Not many people can say they worked with Sybase when it first came out in the mid 1990s–but I can. I used version 4.x (I can’t recall the exact version number) before it was named System 10. Sybase started as a joint development effort with Sybase and Microsoft . In 1993, the co-development agreement expired and they parted ways. Microsoft got a branch of the code and developed what is now SQL Server. At the time, Sybase was so hot that the salesmen were so busy that some barely bothered returning customer calls, but after some years Sybase lost in the marketplace while SQL Server became very successful. Oracle was and is huge in the marketplace. Sybase is owned by SAP now. Perhaps 5 years ago, I needed to write some queries on a Sybase server and I did so using the SAP equivalent of Microsoft SQL Server management Studio. It was a fun trip down memory lane, but it was a bear to find windows drivers that allowed me to connect to it.

I had the Sybase 4.x manual which came in a box with a three ring binder and it contained an entity relationship model of the Sybase system tables. Much of the internal structure of sybase was implemented/exposed in these tables. I found it conceptually beautiful and it was very helpful for learning how Sybase worked. Among the tables were sys.databases, sys.users, and sys.logins which can be seen even today in Azure SQL Server, typically exposed as views rather than actual tables. Around 2005, I got a poster showing an ER diagram of SQL Server system tables/views. It had at least 10 times the number of tables than Sybase 4.x, but in the middle were still those core tables that Sybase 4.x had.

When I work with Azure SQL Server today, I note that SQL Server Management studio has lost much of its capabilities in Azure–specifically the ability to right click an object and see its properties. For example, right clicking a database user and seeing its database memberships, permissions, and roles. So, I am back to spelunking the system views using essentially a visual command line, as I did back in the days of my youth when dinosaurs ruled the earth…