Sybase Inc. later this year plans to extend its Adaptive Server database to increase its ability to access external data such as XML content, a company official said this week.
Plans call for enabling the database to integrate non-relational content, such as XML documents and data such as images, with the traditional relational content stored in the database, said Tom Traubitz, Sybase senior marketing manager.
Improvements planned by the company at various stages are intended to reduce customers database-related costs by 20 per cent to 40 per cent during the next two years to three years by making the product more dynamic and self-adjusting, Traubitz said.
Procedures such as enrolling users will be made easier, Traubitz said.
The company also plans to add support of XQuery, for accessing XML and relational, tabular data in a single query, to the database. But the company has not set a firm date for including this improvement, according to Traubitz. Adaptive Server already supports XQL, which provides SQL-line syntax for querying XML documents.
IBM and Oracle have been touting similar XML-related improvements to their own databases of late.