The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers

Sybase Background

This chapter is intended to provide a brief overview of the architecture of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, covering the most important factors in terms of security. It is not intended to be an administrative guide, but rather a quick, top-level survey of the components and features of Sybase that we will be covering later in the attack and defense chapters.

The Sybase section of this book is mainly concerned with Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, which is Sybase's enterprise-level database, as opposed to Adaptive Server Anywhere, which is a smaller database commonly used for smaller installations and limited hardware platforms such as cellphones and other embedded environments.

Sybase ASE is used extensively in the financial world — banking, stock exchanges, insurance companies — as well as in all of the enterprise applications that you would normally expect to see a large DBMS, such as web services and e-Commerce.

The current release of Sybase ASE is 12.5.3. It is available for a variety of operating systems, notably Windows, Linux, and a variety of Unix platforms.

Sybase sells a variety of products, including two other databases — Adaptive Server Anywhere, mentioned earlier, and ASIQ (Adaptive Server IQ), but because of the popularity of its enterprise DBMS, when people refer to “Sybase,” they generally mean ASE.