History

Sybase Inc. was the first company to market with a client/server RDBMS, which at the time (1988) was known as "Sybase SQL Server." Around 1994 (Sybase SQL Server 4.2), Microsoft Corp. licensed the source code to Sybase SQL Server, to create Microsoft SQL Server. Sybase renamed its product to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) in 1997. The two have gone down quite different paths since then, with ASE now supporting a wide variety of platforms and emphasizing interoperability and performance on high-end hardware, and Microsoft SQL Server emphasizing ease of use and administration, lower cost of ownership, and excellent integration with development environments. Microsoft SQL Server is covered elsewhere in this volume.