Should I migrate from Sybase to SQL Server?

I’m giving a presentation this weekend at SQL CodeCamp about Sybase to SQL Server migrations. I’ve been looking into the background of Sybase in order to give reasons ‘why’ you should do it, and found that as with all technologies there are passionate supporters.

Sybase ASE is a good product from what I can tell. I never had to develop for it, but it does tick all the boxes from what I would expect from a relational database system.

Would I consider Sybase ASE for a new project today? Almost certainly not. I would choose a RDMS with a far larger market share such as Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. Sybase ASE does in fact now come in a 64-bit Windows version, but there are probably only a handful of instances around the globe whereas SQL Server now has countless.

Would I migrate from an existing Sybase instance? It really depends if there was a compelling reason.

• Data Center standardizing on SQL Server
• Need to run database in 64-bit under Windows ( with a proven market share )
• Difficult to find resources who are experienced with Sybase (developers and DBA’s)

If the reason was compelling enough then you should run the Microsoft SSMA tool against your database to determine the amount of work required for a migration.

Sybase ASE Installation	Action?
Low connection usage	Put into a virtual machine
Simple CRUD Stored Procedures	Migrate to SQL Server with SSMA
Complex business logic in Stored Procedures	Feasibility study into database migration required. Potentially a lot of work needed.
Dynamic SQL queries from application	Feasibility into application remediation required. Potentially a lot of work needed.

I would say that in a majority of cases, you will require a great deal of work to port your database over to the SQL Server world. The SSMA tool is good but you will still be looking at a great deal of expense to make it happen.

Error in Managed .NET Sybase Provider

Getting this error with your Sybase .NET driver? There is limited discussion that I found via Google, so I thought I would mention the solution here:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ERROR Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

at at Sybase.Data.AseClient.Unmanaged.ExecuteCommand(IntPtr pCommandHandle)

at Sybase.Data.AseClient.AseCommand.Execute()

at Sybase.Data.AseClient.AseCommand._ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior commandBehavior)

at Sybase.Data.AseClient.AseCommand.System.Data.IDbCommand.ExecuteReader()

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

To fix this, contact Sybase and get the latest managed driver from August 2008:

Sybase.AdoNet2.AseClient.dll and Sybase.AdoNet.AseClient.dll

Version: 1.15.325.0

Released 15th August 2008

The difference between the 2 DLL’s is that one is for .Net 1.0 and the other for .NET 2.0.

This is apparently from the Sybase SDK, and Sorry, I can not provide this to you at all. Please contact Sybase!

 

 

 

 

Pictures in the Cloud – SSDS demo app

I’ve been playing around with SQL Server Data Services, Microsoft’s new concept for the ‘datacenter in the cloud’.

Anyhow, I’ve been having a bit of hack around to show how pictures can be stored by this kind of service. There isn’t any reason to use this over the other online photo sharing sites, but it demonstrates how to use the API.

http://www.codeplex.com/CloudPictures

As far as I can tell, there are no ‘best practices’ about how to use SSDS (probably because no one is publicly using it for the enterprise yet). Hopefully writing this application will show me the best way to achieve this.

There isn’t a ‘release’ yet, but if you download the source, build it (VS 2008) get a username and password and edit the app.config then it should work straight away.

New Sydney ALT.NET User Group

Sydney has a few user groups which are great to show off Microsoft products and API’s. Still, Mich Denny has pointed to the new Sydney ALT.NET user group for those subjects that fall outside of the mainstream domain.

In particular, I’m looking forward to see RhinoMocks in action.

There are a lot of great ideas that don’t get enough exposure simply because there is probably too much to learn these days already. Nevertheless, someone who writes code or an architect will always benefit from at least knowing these technologies exist and how they can be applied. 

 

 

http://sydneyaltdotnet.blogspot.com/

Google Chrome great for your Google Applications

I don’t actually like downloading anything that isn’t Microsoft.. I’m a certified MS fanboy.

I hate iTunes and the many services it installed in the background. I hate Flash as a main reason my browser crashes. I hate anything that tries to install a Google/Yahoo/Whatever toolbar into my browser. I really hate any software that needs to be run in administrator mode.

This isn’t absolute however. I love uTorrent because it is an executable file that just runs without trying to install its presence deep into my computer. I like VMWare Workstation because it is actually a very good product.

I’m actually a big user of Google Reader, but have been finding that it wasn’t working great with Internet Explorer. Often my laptop would start allocation 200MB  to IE, and then shoot the IE process usage up to 99%. It could always be fixed by shutting down the Google Reader tab. I move around a lot and use Google Reader from at least 4 different machines, my mobile and public terminals, and I don’t think there is a better alternative. In addition I use Google Maps and GMail a bit as well.

So I actually installed Google Chrome and am really happy so far. I use it mostly for Google applications and they work better than with IE. I haven’t tried the integrated ‘Google Gears’ (I installed it once as beta and it crashed my IE all the time), but that will be compelling when I am off line next time.

So it is faster, and memory usage is way down when using Google applications.

Check it out:

http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html?hl=en&brand=CHMG&utm_source=en-hpp&utm_medium=hpp&utm_campaign=en

Presenting the SSMA tool at the SQL Down Under Code Camp 2008

I wrote before about the Microsoft SSMA toolfor Sybase/Oracle to SQL Server Migrations.

I’m actually going to present this at the SQL Down Under Code Campin Wagga Wagga, Australia on the 11th October 2008.

Clone Detective

If my brain was a CPU, it would definitely be single core. When I’m in the ‘zone’ of development, I focus on one task at a time.

When I can just feel that new feature around the corner I really want to see it work as quickly as possible. In such a scenario I can repeat code from other places just to make it work with the promise to reference the code from a single place later on.

Enter Clone Detective. This add in for Visual Studio analysises you C# code and determines if there are any repeats of code. Really useful.

Check it out:

http://www.codeplex.com/CloneDetectiveVS

Custom PC or Droneware?

It is really fun to build your own desktop computer, but three years ago I got a $2000 allowance from my company and a new exciting project. I wanted to be productive as soon as possible and didn’t want to scrimp and save for the sake of it.

For the first time I turned to Dell and got a good Pentium-D system that I am still using today. Well.. sort of using.. It runs 64-bit Vista but is struggling a bit with my VirtualPC images.

I was really happy with my Dell. Even that one unfortunate time that the hard disk corrupted, they sent out a new one straight away. If I didn’t do any development work I could see myself happily using this for another 3 years. Did I mention is is very quiet?

But with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, I really want an upgrade to true 64bit goodness with 8GB and 4 cores. A new machine is needed.

I read Jeff Atwood’s blog post on building your own machine with interest. I agree with him that it is a good thing to build your own PC, although I would disagree that knowing how it fits together helps me too much with my development tasks. I really like his tip for use a small 10,000 RPM Rapter drive as the main drive though, and I will use it.

But go back to building a custom machine? I’m probably going to go with a Dell XPS desktop system, and buy the extra RAM and Rapter disk for it separately. I’ll get the ‘lowest’ version of Vista that comes with it and install Windows Server 2008 instead.

After reading around, I was happy to see that it isn’t actually too difficult to run new games on Win Server 2008 as well

Update: 10/08/2008

Well, I ‘almost’ did it. For some reason, the Dell XPS machines support a maximum of 4GB of RAM. The sales rep told me that I should consider a ‘Precision’ workstation which can handle this, although they cost $1000 more.

If a $2000 Dell machine is only capable of 4GB, then it really makes me wonder about the quality of its components.

New Microsoft SSMA Database Migration Tools

Just noticed that the Microsoft SSMA team have given a final release to Verion 4.0 of their SSMA tools last week: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/solutions/migration/default.mspx

Definately check these out if you have any legacy

• Sybase
• Oracle
• Access

databases lying around.

Converting a relational database from Sybase to SQL Server is relatively easy compared to a programming conversion from J2EE to C#.

Nevertheless, a lot of business logic in your stored procedures can cause you to have to rewrite them, and these tools will at the very least identify these problems for you, and even give a rough development time estimate.

Installing Vista SP1 on Ultimate

Hmm… I really thought MS were getting better at error messages. Basically it told me that my Windows Vista Ultimate was not supported by the English language service pack.. how odd:

“Windows Vista Service Pack 1 cannot be installed on your computer because the language of Windows Vista you have installed is not supported or you have installed a language pack that is not supported.
Windows Vista Service pack 1 can only be installed on computers running the English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish versions of Windows Vista or computers running only those language packs.”

Esspecially since my version was English.. maybe not English enough? I think this is the point where most people gave up, and I went looking for a kb.

The answer is easy! Because it was Ultimate edition, I had installed another language NOT listed above! Well, fine, but does it:

a) Mean I can’t upgrade?

b) At least tell me in the dialog box that this could be the problem?

So ‘all’ I have to do is remove the extreemly offensive foreign language and install again. I think Microsoft just wants users to suffer for buying Ultimate edition…

kb in question