Sybase has announced a new database engine called Advantage Database Server (ADS) that is supposed to be comparable to MySQL. Does anyone have experience interfacing ADS with Servoy, and, if so, would you be willing to comment on its performance?
Thanks!
Kim
Hi Kim,
It’s the first time I heard of this product so I did some googling and learned it’s not a new engine but a new release (v9).
So far I don’t see any mention of being comparable to MySQL. Perhaps you read that it supports ISAM. But I don’t think that has anything to do with MySQL though.
As for interfacing with it, I read that it comes with JDBC4 driver with it so if that is fully compliant with the JDBC standards it should work nicely with Servoy.
You can get a free 30 day trial version though so you might want to try it out.
Hi, Robert.
It’s good to hear from you!
A couple of fellows from Sybase in Boise, Idaho, gave a presentation on ADS at the San Diego FoxPro Developers Network meeting last night. They are the ones that said they were targeting it as an alternative to MySQL. They did mention the JDBC driver as well as a VFP (Visual FoxPro) driver. Both drivers are of interest to us, because we are converting from a legacy VFP application to Servoy and thought this might be useful in some way. Every attendee got a CD-ROM with a free 5-user license ADS system along with a ‘how to’ book and a memory stick containing development goodies. I do plan to evaluate ADS (eventually) but was hoping someone else with experience could give some insight as to its performance.
They demonstrated some interesting ADS features (I don’t know if Sybase SQL has them). For instance, you can search for a text string within a field, table, or database (a demonstrated string search on 4 GB of data took about a minute on an older laptop computer). Another feature was the NEAR command whereby the positional relationship of two words is returned (e.g. the word ‘office’ is three words away from the word ‘room’). NEAR has a totally different meaning in VFP related to indexing.
Kim
We have been using the ADS engine for a number of years - prior to our Servoy experience. The chief reason for us is that it provides (in addition to its own .ADT database format) a full standards based SQL access to .DBF file based systems. In one incarnation (what they call the ‘local engine’ ) it is free. For a true server based implementations a Licence does become payable after the 30 day evaluation period. We have also used it with Servoy as a bridge to get data from Dos based Foxpro tables into both Sybase (SQLanywhere) and MySQL. We have found it to perform well and be very stable though it does not cope fully with some of the non standard expressions it is possible to put into a foxpro CDX type index definition (seems to be mostly compound expressions that rely on a lot of stirng manipultion, ‘INLIST’ for example) depending on the level of complexity of the expression it may mean the table in question can be accessed only as read only or not accessable at all.
We have successfully installed ADS, connected it to our FoxPro tables, and imported them into the ADS format.
We are attempting to connect Servoy to the ADS engine using the ‘adsjdbc.jar’ driver provided by ADS. We copied the ‘adsjdbc.jar’ file into the following folder:
C:\Servoy\application_server\drivers
and restarted the Servoy server. Then, we created a new database connection using the following:
URL: jdbc:extendedsystems:advantage:\localhost:6262; catalog=d:\testdata\testdata.add
Drvier: com.extendedsystems.jdbc.advantage.ADSDriver
The people at ADS tell us the URL and Driver strings are correct, yet Servoy server will not connect. When trying to do the same thing in Servoy Developer, the ADS driver does not even show in the list of database drivers.
Are we missing something?
Did you check the log files to find out if there is an error message explaining what goes wrong?
We are running Servoy Server 4.1.1 Build 658, and it does not produce any log files (another problem we are having). But, Servoy Server is working!
kwpsd:
We are running Servoy Server 4.1.1 Build 658, and it does not produce any log files (another problem we are having). But, Servoy Server is working!
Kim,
Maybe these problems are related?
Could it be that Servoy does not have permissions to write to log and/or configuration files?
Note that on Vista, programs installed in the program files directory have limited permissions.
Rob
I’m the Advantage R&D manager and I briefly tested Servoy with Advantage last year while at the Southwest Fox conference. I verified I am using a similar connection string and it is working.
You might want to try forward slashes in the paths, that’s what I used in my connection string and it worked. Also you can open the Advantage Data Architect and make a remote server connection to your .add file using the “remote server management” utility and that will verify the Advantage server is up and running.
Feel free to ask Advantage-specific questions on our JDBC newsgroup as well at news://devzone.advantagedatabase.com If Servoy users run into any compatibility issues with our JDBC driver we would be happy to address them.
J.D. Mullin
Advantage R&D
This is what my connection looks like (attached png):
Thanks, Jeremy…our driver name was slightly different than yours. Used your driver name, and ADS works fine now!
jeremym1234:
I’m the Advantage R&D manager
Hi,
is there going to be a Mac OS-X version of Advantage at any point, or would I have to have a Windows/Linux server running ADS if I wanted Mac clients to access it?
Thanks,
Rafi
jeremym1234:
I’m the Advantage R&D manager
Hi Jeremy - I’m not sure thre is much info on ADS around, briefly looking at the Sybase site and google, I’m still not sure what if anything the ADS offeres as beneficial over the likes of MySQL and MSSQL Express etc.
Are thre any resources where the feature set and benefits are explained in basic terms (specifically as regards to why its better than the rest)?
I am the Product Manager to Advantage Database Server. Take a look at the information on our website
http://www.sybase.com/products/database … ted-foxpro
One of the biggest advantages is that you don’t have to convert your data. We support the FoxPro tables, so you can switch to our driver with your existing DBF tables and get benefits like encryption, replication, hot backup, hiding your data, and using DBF tables over 2GB.
You can also access your data with different applications at the same time. For example, VFP and Servoy. This is handy for extending your application with different technologies or converting your application to a different language module by module instead of having to convert everything at once in a big bang.
Hope this helps.
Mike
