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Comment by dailo10 | Hacker News Reader

$5.25 Billion! Wow. Who uses Sybase??

I feel out of touch. The only enterprise DBs I run into these days are Oracle and MSSQL.

It's popular in the financial sector because of the speed of it's mathematical functions. Back 10 years ago Sybase was the default at the bank I worked at.

In particular Sybase IQ is popular in finance companies since it's based on a column storage engine which makes for very fast aggregation queries (albeit at the expense of slower inserts and updates). Speed matters when you're working with tables with over a billion rows.

Sybase isn't really in the enterprise DB space anymore. That part of the business still exists, but it's not really what they push, as far as I've been told. These days, they primarily do client-server middleware for mobile devices. Device tracking, remote wiping / encryption, that kind of stuff.

They still make huge bank in the enterprise DB space. I would imagine middleware for mobile is a tiny amount of their revenue.

Not true at all. They do have other lines of business, but their databases business continues to grow. See http://seekingalpha.com/article/185179-sybase-inc-q4-2009-ea..., e.g.

Sybase is still quite popular in the investment banking world. GS is a big enough client that their ASE 12.5 installations are still being supported despite it officially being EOL for everyone else...

I think BGI is using an even older version. Those guys handle a few billion trades a day using Sybase, and I don't see them upgrading any time soon. They tried switching to Oracle a few years back but the project got canned.

When I was there at BGI, almost all the business logic was encoded in Sybase triggers & stored procs. It was pretty painful debugging a trade due to all the triggers.

Sybase is pretty popular in the financial sector.

i didn't even know sybase was still around. i thought microsoft acquired some kind of sybase technology and started selling it as mssql?

Due to a very poorly structured deal MSFT was able to use Sybase's own code to compete against them. Be careful who writes your contracts.

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