SAP ASE offers great performance and value
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use ASE as the foundation for our 401(k) record keeping system. We store approximately 35,000 data elements spread across 24 databases and 2,000 tables. We have approximately 40 TB of data stored in our database. SAP ASE allows us to serve our many clients and business partners concurrently given its high performance and high availability features. Our application is an enterprise application used to service a number of clients both internal and external. SAP ASE is not an enterprise solution within our organization but is used by our department and several others departments for various financial applications. Our application started in 1992 and was originally sold as a licensed product and through merger and acquisition became owned by the bank.
Pros
- High availability and reliability.
- High performance.
- Monitoring of threshold based events.
- Security at multiple levels.
- Query plan optimization.
- Lock management.
- Access to HANA.
Cons
- Full database encryption - need to utilize external keys vs internal - for better separation of duties.
- History Tables.
Likelihood to Recommend
High-performance, high-concurrency transactions are well suited for ASE. ASE is lacking some features in my opinion such as history tables, however there are ways to implement them via workarounds or by using Replication Server. I do think the way the ASE parser and optimizer works are far superior to other products as it is a true cost-based optimizer and the order of the tables in the FROM clause does not really matter although a good SQL coder will place the tables in a meaningful order to make the SQL more readable. ASE is good for applications that require high availability and can be used for mission critical systems.