Sybase Support - What is SAP plans for its future?

[Former Member]

As an official re-seller and representative of Sybase products in Israel, I have been using Sybase technical support facilities available through the old www.sybase.com portal.   As this slowly but steadily dies, what is the alternative SAP provides?

I need an urgent access to the EBFs download page in order to support one of my customers - what is the new link?  Is there a transition path for old credentials approved by Sybase to SAP so that I may continue to access the resources that were available to me in Sybase?

I need also an urgent access to Sybase case-express system in order to treat one of a critical cases with yet another Sybase local custmer - what is the link for that? 

It is very unhelpful that the transition from Sybase portal to SAP portal is not made invisible to all the users that were using the portal for crucial support functions approved by Sybase in the past.  It would be a good idea to track the active customers of the site (say, MySybase users with technical support privileges) and provide them alternative solution for the functions they were willing with their customers before these functions are disabled on Sybase.com.   Not doing this disrupts normal support operation with customers and creates bad reputation for both those catering the support and Sybase/SAP.

Any quick help on this available from SAP headquarters?

Thanks.

[Former Member]

We'll from my experience (10 years of ASE,Rep Server and IQ) here is what is quite obvious since SAP bought Sybase.

a) SAP is more interested in selling HANA and letting IQ and Sybase flagship product ASE wither away! Why do I say this? Call Sybase support and open a case up with SAP IQ and you usually have it figured out before SAP engineering does! A basic example is sp_iqestspace. Couldn't get it to work and SAP finally said opps... There is a bug with 15.4 so were sending you the new proc code... We'll Opps, after numerous back N forth and it's  still not working.. "Table Not Found" Same with getting SCC working on our LINUX box.. We gave up! My last Gig at DoD, they migrated from IQ 12.0 to Oracle 10G where you can at least have a network of folks who use the product and the resolutions are concise and to the point unlike IQ! Very little documentation with IQ and error messages are usually round robins to no where! Same with Sybase Central! Look at the earliest to the newest versions and very little if any changes/enhancements have been added. SQL Server and Oracle OEM are 1000x more robust than SC or SCC! Migrate data, compare database objects.. e.t.c all basic DBA task and SC can't do it!   Sorry to rant but I'm at wits end with Sybase! Oracle promised us a better product and my 1st thought was, thats NOT to high of a bar to achieve with what we have now! But we'll see next week!

[peter_baumgartner]

I totally agree with you - HANA looks very promising - but not for 90% of our customers. So we need a good and reliable DB we can count on. We already use ASE for a few SAP installations and I'd like to migrate more customers to ASE. But I'm a little concerned about the future of ASE - will it be sometimes dropped like MaxDB? Can I motivate our customers to migrate to ASE without regretting it in 5-6 years and loose their faith?

One more thing: Are there any good marketing and technical papers WHY a customer should choose ASE over oracle, DB2 or MS SQL? Every other DB vendor has such white papers why and how to migrate from ASE to their DB platform....

[Former Member]

Hi all - well I work for a large SAP partner on SAP projects for various customers and I can tell you that there is real activity around ASE - only in the past 2 years have I started to hear a general murmur about moving entirely to ASE as the rdbms platform for the whole SAP Business Suite.

As you mention it's a very good product, it's cost is very competitive and it is SAP-roadmap aligned.

It would be great to see some really good whitepaper links on here to get the SCN community buzzing

[Former Member]

Hello everybody,

All of the discussions above are only about Sybase IQ only. I could not find any future or road maps specifically for ASE. It is the time for the ASE DBA to up skill to IQ ?

What are the plans from SAP to enhance and shine Sybase ASE ?

Can we see the Sybase ASE becoming number 2 with in 2015 ? as SAP promised during purchase.

ASE really lacks some of very good features that Oracle has,  eg: RMAN.

Sybase's point in time recovery associated with load db is not equal to oracle's RAMN.

The recovery is one of the main feature that a enterprise rdms should have and I cant always say my customer to go for clean old full backup.

Very main issues are with the Certification and recognition. We are not able to book a date for certification in INDIA. Hence forth we are not able to showcase of skills.  

[former_member182090]

The ASE product roadmap is available at SAP Service Marketplace, along with the other SAP product roadmaps.

You should check out the enhancements to ASE dump/load features over the past 2 years. There are many more ways of doing things now than before.

And yes, picking up IQ skills is always a good idea.

[sap_mk]

Just to clarify one point. You said, "Can we see the Sybase ASE becoming number 2 with in 2015 ? as SAP promised during purchase."  However, the goal was that SAP becomes the number 2 database vendor. This is being pursued with HANA, ASE, IQ, SQLAnywhere, and MaxDB - all databases from SAP.

If I remember correctly, HANA hadn't been announced at the time of the Sybase acquisition, so everyone concluded the reference was to ASE and IQ.

[Former Member]

I only hope that SAP will not forget that ASE was (and still is) before HANA and will not forsake the large ASE market for which HANA is not really a solution - at least not the solution the customer is waiting for.  SAP is a huge company.  ASE is an exquisite product.  SAP is explicitly aggressive about HANA.  ASE is - yes still - marketed badly.  There is a lot of effort and thought put into ASE product - true, but the marketing still lags behind.  Is it not something to be proud of that asynchronous logging and IMDB has been introduced into ASE long before Microsoft started to rub its forehead?  Marketing HANA at the expense of other SAP/SYBASE products is not really a good idea.

[Former Member]

Rob, if i don`t have access to SAP Service Marketplace (but i`m Sybase CIS customer) where can i find shared SAP product roadmaps, particularly for ASE? thx

[former_member182090]

SAP only publishes it roadmaps on SMP. Best thing to do is contact Sybase CIS, they should have access to this information.

[Former Member]

I'm going to be candid with you regarding SAP/Sybase since working with their products for the past 10 years. ASE/Rep server, ASA and IQ

SAP is depreciating Sybase Central for IQ version 16x so were possibly looking to migrate to Oracle which includes numerous GUI tools packaged with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM).  Me and numerous other Sybase DBA are bewildered that when SAP purchased Sybase, we thought since SAP had deep pockets, they would invigorate Sybase instead of letting it wither away. Sorry to vent but numerous folks feel the same as I do. Plus, there are numerous Job openings for migration projects from Sybase to Oracle or SQL server. This is what has been going on with Sybase since SAP purchased Sybase. Instead of improving Sybase products, there more interested in selling HANA which core dumped at Coin Star when I consulted with them. We could never get HANA to work so SAP let CoinStar/Red Box buy IQ on the cheap. I'm just being candid... . Below are other issues were having with SAP.

a) Call Sybase Support before 8:00 AM EST you get a off shored resource who can barely speak a word of English.

b) Very little if any documentation for concise troubleshooting issues in regards to SAP ASA and IQ products. And when we call Sybase support, we either have the issue resolved by the time Sybase gets back to us or were told to upgrade. Example... mirroring upgrade from 11x to 12x NO DOCUMENTATION. The XDOCS are for 16x upgrade.

c) Unlike Oracle and SQL server. Every new release of SAP IQ, very little if any enhancements are made and none for Sybase Central which does 1/10 of what OEM and SQL server Management Studio does. 

Like I said previously, there are numerous job openings where folks are fleeing Sybase to Oracle and SQL Server and quite frankly, We (Numerous Sybase DBA) feel SAP could care less. Pardon my candor but I feel someone  should speak up!

[courtney_driscoll]

Jeff –

I worked for Sybase for 11 years prior to the merge so I am a “traditional-Sybase” person too; I wanted to address your frustrations and concerns and let you know that SAP is dedicated to continuing support for the Sybase product-lines.

The first concern being that SAP is going to let IQ wither away – this is not true, in fact R&D investment continues with SAP Sybase IQ, because IQ is a strategic part of the SAP technology family – both as an independent product, and as extended storage for large SAP HANA deployments.  You can view the SAP Sybase IQ Roadmap here to see its future direction.

The release of SAP Sybase IQ 16 included a wealth of new features in 2013 In fact, in terms of engineering effort, it was the biggest release in IQ’s 16+ year history: a re-engineered column store for improved data compression; low latency, write-optimized delta store; fully parallel loading; new indexing technology for improved incremental batch load performance; data affinity for “shared nothing” performance; and RBAC authorization and LDAP authentication. In the monitoring and administration area, SAP Sybase IQ 16 has adopted a web-based framework called SAP Control Center. You might want to check out the webinar presented by Dobbler Consulting “What’s New in SAP Sybase IQ 16 and Why it Matters to You” – along with our “How To” tutorials . 

SAP Control Center (SCC) includes all of the capabilities of Sybase Central, plus enhancements in the area of historical reporting, alerting, and graphical visualizations.  The benefit to web-based monitoring and administration are the ability to access the managed system easily from a browser and it does not require installing client software.  Also, SCC is a unified Sybase server command center, for administering and monitoring a multitude of SAP Sybase servers – SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, and SAP Sybase Replication Server, from a single point of control. Looking ahead, further performance and manageability improvements are in the works for SAP Sybase IQ, as well as more granular monitoring statistics from SCC.

The documentation for IQ 16 has been re-organized for easier searching, and merges material for SQL Anywhere features together with IQ features; these used to be separated, making navigation more difficult.  In addition, a new hardware sizing guide, and best practices guide are available to augment the technical user docs, with content created by our product experts in the field. In fact we have a new IQ Help Portal available at http://help.sap.com/iq Our experts also monitor the IQ SCN Developer site to assist with any questions customers or partners may have.

Concerning support, SAP has a global support team that uses the “follow-the-sun practices”, in order to ensure that we are able to offer incident handling and problem resolution on a 24 x 7 basis. You can visit the SAP Support Portal for local information and FAQs. You can also speak to a SAP Support representative and escalate your incident if you feel it is not progressing appropriately. Regarding documentation for Troubleshooting – one of the many benefits from SAP is their approach to Knowledge Base Articles (these are based on industry standard Knowledge-Centered Support [KCS]) where by troubleshooting techniques and screenshots are made available for customers to directly access and find solutions to problems the support team has already solved. These are available now and will continue on an on-going basis for SAP Sybase products.

And finally, while I cannot comment on any of the specifics of an individual customer due to privacy concerns, the customer, Coinstar (now called Outerwall) is doing well and working on rolling out SAP Sybase IQ; the product was purchased for a very specific use case, in which IQ was the perfect fit. SAP will continue to develop and support SAP Sybase IQ both as a stand-alone product and as a companion to SAP HANA.

I hope I have answered and possibly alleviated some of your concerns. The Sybase product-lines are an integral part of SAP and we hope to have your continued passionate and loyal support.

—Courtney 

[Former Member]

Actually, I must confess that with support "shifting hands" from Sybase to SAP I felt that I am cared for more rather than less.  No offence to the old-Sybase team.  I think this is a matter of finances put into it, not the willingness to help. 

To share my personal experience with SAP support,  I have been pretty much surprised when my questions on SCN were taken up seriously and I have received a series of phone-calls from SAP employees aimed at resolving/explaining some issues.  I do not remember this happen before.  This is on the personal level.  On the professional level, being involved in pretty tough migration project for one of the local customers, I have been in tight communication with SAP (ex-Sybase) TSE/PSE teams - exchanging messages several times a day and working in live webex sessions "following the sun" - with either European or Atlantic support teams. As many other Sybase fans, I too feel a bit uneasy about Sybase future - if only because Sybase is not a major focus of SAP.  But so far SAP did not neglect Sybase products since the merge.  Sybase products have improved significantly - probably again as a result of larger budget.  Let's hope this trend will continue. 

An aside on SCC:  I think this is a very highly coveted tool for Sybase DBA community.  But to me, even after SAP has started to reorganize documentation, SCC too lacks user-friendly documentation and is still a bit unpolished.  I wanted to integrate it into the post 15.7 upgrade DB environment but found myself struggling with the tool and for the lack of time and lack of clear documentation put the effort temporarily aside.  Which is quite a pity:  Sybase DBAs do lack a decent tool to manage their systems.  This opens a niche for third party tools, which are scarce and have their disadvantages as well.  On the positive side, we must not forget that this is still a "young" tool.  It has been improving constantly.  If SAP will not decide to cut off its code line (for DBA Cockpit say), it will ultimately evolve in THE tool for Sybase DBA community.  We'll wait and see.

[Former Member]

Courtney,

Wow, thanks for the comprehensive response. It sounds very positive to have someone from SAP give such a concise answer.

[Former Member]

Andrew, And please convey the fear of SAP/Sybase sun setting Sybase Central and replacing it with SCC. I have had nothing but bad KARMA with SCC. I'm stuck with Sybase Support in regards to getting past the USERID and login process. 

[former_member213459]

Thank you Courtney for providing these valuable insights. And thank you for mentioning our webinar we hosted last year. Since then we held another webinar this spring on "SAP IQ 16 Roadmap - What To Expect". Courtney Claussen talks about the next steps in the SAP IQ evolution. Some of the highlights are the new shared nothing architecture that allows you to build a MultiPlex without a shared SAN storage. The RLV (Row Level Versioning) will be available in the MultiPlex and then the point in time recovery option, which adds a transaction log to SAP IQ. This has a nice side effect of Replication Server being able to read SAP IQ transaction and then replication out of SAP IQ will be possible.

SAP IQ has a bright future and current new install numbers support its popularity.

If you still have doubts about the future of the former Sybase product line in SAP, take a look at the content from this year's ISUG-TECH conference. The ISUG-TECH Conference Presentations are now online. These are downloadable presentations and live video recordings of each session.

[Former Member]

Hi Andrew,

The unexpected outage on case-express.sybase.com is completely separate from the migration to the SAP Support Portal. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

As mentioned in our follow up on this – and to reassure other Customers reading this post :
Customer migration from Sybase Support to the SAP Service Marketplace will occur at Support renewal time (from January 2013) and there will a formal communication sent to each Sybase customer contact well in advance of their migration.
Within SAP Service Marketplace, a specific landing page was setup for Sybase Customers: http://service.sap.com/sybase/support

There is a lot of content such as FAQs and twice weekly live demo sessions available for newly migrated Customers on the Sybase Support Portal in SAP Service Market Place to help former Sybase Customers to transition smoothly to the new SAP Support Portal.
Customers will also receive a welcome letter “Welcome Letter” along with the renewal quotation. The letter outlines the key elements of SAP support that the customer can expect, and can be found on the landing page and here.

Best regards,
Andrew

[Former Member]

Here is my experience with being migrated from Sybase Support to SAP Support.  This was my actual experience.  Please improve this for future migrations.

1)  All of my users under the Sybase support account were migrated to SAP, but put into a "deleted" S-User ID status.  An S-User ID is the impossible to remember string of numbers that is your "user name" for login purposes.  We are all just a number.

2) We were alerted of the migration, only by logging into the Sybase support site (such as case-express).

3) I have to call the support number to get our new company number.

4) Our email domain was not tied to the new company number, so upon requesting an S-User ID for the company number, it gives an error that the email domain is not assigned to this company number.

5) #1 above causes you to not be able to request an S-User ID.  Well, you can request it, you will just never receive an email with your S-User ID.

6) #1 also disallows you from resetting your password, stating that you don't have an S-User ID assigned for this company

7) #6 might prompt you to request a new S-User ID, in which case, the system would respond that you already have an S-User ID

😎 The above requires another phone call to SAP to "un-delete" your account. They will direct you to contact your company's "Super Administrator", who will be a person who does not work at your company, to fix your problem.  A message will be created to have your S-User ID un-deleted, as the person you talk to will not be able to do this.

9)  You finally get logged in, after you are notified that your S-User ID has been "un-deleted".  You are also informed that you are now a "Super Administrator", since the other "Super Administrator" doesn't exist.

10) Your co-workers all experience the above issues.  They call in to have their account "un-deleted", but instead of fixing it, they are directed to the new "Super Administrator", aka "you".  You have no idea how to fix their problem, as you just barely got logged into the site, after entering your password on every page that you go to, possibly 3+ times per page.

11) You eventually find out how to set up a single sign-on certificate for the site, so you can now click "ok" rather than entering your impossible to remember S-UserID and password at every click.

12)  With 2 days left to be able to use case-express, no tickets are showing up as having been migrated to SAP.

[Former Member]

Hi Jack,

Thanks for your feedback. Just to let you know that I did raise this to the migration team who are looking into these issues.

If you need to raise further questions related to your experience of support, I would suggest using the support & maintenance SCN community: http://scn.sap.com/community/software-support-and-maintenance who should be able to assist.

Thanks

Andrew

[JanStallkamp]

Hi.

As I'm from the 'traditional' SAP side, not from the 'traditional' Sybase side I cannot comment on most of the migration issues you are describing. But Andrew already answered that. But I would like to comment on the #1 S-User - "We are all just a number":

Yes, everyone at SAP get's a number. And you will need this number for Service Marketplace to log in. But in the ticket handling systems this number is mapped to your name. So for everyone working in support in the tickets it shows your real name. By the way: Please do not share S-Users. It can be really strange if the system tells me that there is an update from user 'Andrew' and then it ends with 'Regards, Jack'. Or if someone named 'Mr. SAP' opens a ticket.

So don't be afraid that you're 'just a number'. That's just the identity column we need.

Best regards,

Jan

[Former Member]

We are finally setup correctly.

Jan, I just wish my username was something I could remember.  I access SAP from several computers, so while the "single sign-on" certificate is nice, once set up, I still have to store my S-UserId somewhere, so I can look it up (actually single sign-on makes it even easier to forget your S-UserId, when you have to access the site from a new computer).  Why not just use the individual's email address?   Aren't those also unique?  You can still use that S-UserID in the database to tie everything together, but let me log in with my email address. Just a thought.

[Former Member]

Hi Jack,

Glad to hear that you are finally setup on SMP.

Best regards,

Andrew

[former_member185199]

I would like to add here that the SSO is a nightmare when you have your private sid and also one from your customer for marketplace stuff like case incidents. SAP is actually not able to "connect" this 2 accounts so i needed to delete all the certificates to be able to use both.

cheers

DJ

[Former Member]

Thanks a lot.

[former_member3043]

As discussed in the call.

CaseXpress is currently down, I will contact IT to fix this. The EBF Page is up again and you should be able to download the patches.

The migration to SAP portal and support services will be discussed with you later, cause the migration is in progress to start and it might take a while, in the meantime just use the free channels here in SCN or the known Sybase Channels.