"We established three main objectives for version 8.0 early in the design process: performance, easier usability and development, and the addition of key functionality that would make Advantage extremely competitive," said Chuck Vertrees (pictured center), product manager for Advantage Database Server 8.0, which was released today at the Borland Developers Conference by iAnywhere, a Sybase subsidiary.

"Early customer feedback indicates that we have accomplished all of our objectives," Vertrees added.

The Advantage Database Server was recently acquired by Sybase through its purchase of Extended Systems in October 2005. The business has since been integrated into Sybase’s iAnywhere subsidiary.

Advantage Database Server 8.0 , says Sybase, is a full-featured, high performance client/server data management system targeted towards Borland Delphi and C++ Builder developers. Its new features are as follows:

• Advantage Data Architect 8.0 includes a redesigned graphical interface with more efficient workflow to make application design and development faster and dramatically increase developer productivity.
• Advantage Replication allows easy distribution and replication of data changes across multiple servers. Advantage Replication is based on an asynchronous push model to minimize the performance impact on applications and the latency in delivering updates to target databases.
• Advantage Online Backup provides the ability to efficiently create a “hot” backup of a database, which is a snapshot of the data at a specific time, even if other users are currently using and modifying the database. Full and differential backups can be created, providing a structurally identical backup image of the database for later usage or disaster recovery.
• Advantage 8.0 also includes an ANSI SQL PSM 2003 standard scripting language in the Advantage SQL engine. This allows developers to easily create powerful triggers, stored procedures, and perform other common database tasks.