"Our performance improvement is about 10 percent to 15 percent just out of the box," said Jody Mulkey, vice president for data systems at Shopzilla Inc. The Los Angeles-based consumer price search engine has upgraded about one-third of its production databases and all of its development and quality-assurance databases to ASE 15. Mulkey said that Shopzilla, as an e-commerce company dependent on Web advertising, needs a nimble database that can be tuned for ever-faster performance.

While Mulkey hasn't concluded yet how much more of an increase in query execution speed he can wring out of ASE 15, he said the database has already proven, via its partitioning feature, strong at "reducing complexity as much as possible." Shopzilla plans to move completely to ASE 15 by November.

Starz Entertainment Group LLC has upgraded the staging databases for its Sybase IQ-based data warehouse to ASE 15.

"The performance has been great so far," said Nancy Dreisbach, database administration manager at the Englewood, Colo.-based cable broadcaster. Starz uses ASE 12.5 to manage its movie and TV show database, which is used to manage its broadcasts, and to facilitate downloads at its Vongo video-on-demand service. Dreisbach cited ASE 15's column-level encryption feature and its rewritten optimizer as being particularly useful.

In an interview, Sybase CEO John Chen said that a quarter of ASE 15's new customers migrated from other databases, primarily Windows NT, with the rest upgrading from ASE 12.5, which was released in 2001. Besides the new features, Sybase says the increase in sales of its ASE and SQL Anywhere databases can be attributed to an increase in the number of Sybase developers. There are now 160,000 such developers, up more than 200 percent from the 60,000 in 2002, Chen said during a keynote speech at Techwave. Sybase expects to begin offering a shared disk cluster feature in ASE 15 by the first half of next year.