SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise or SAP ASE is a relational database management system from SAP. It was known as Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise or Sybase ASE until SAP Acquired Sybase. Generally, when people talk about Sybase database, they mean Sybase Adaptive Server, not Sybase SQL Anywhere.

We support Sybase Adaptive Server (ASE) directly in our products! You don't need separate drivers and can immediately connect to your database.

Initially, the product was called Sybase SQL Server. Microsoft ported Sybase SQL Server to IBM OS/2 in 1988 and both Sybase and Microsoft sold and supported the product until the co-development licensing agreement ended in 1993. Codebases diverged, so Microsoft released Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase continued working on Sybase SQL Server. In 1996 Sybase was forced to rename its product to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise in order to avoid confusion with Microsoft SQL Server.

Sybase ASE is a very capable database especially popular in financial institutions. SAP hopes to take customers wanting to run its SAP ERP from Oracle to SAP ASE, but it’s not easy (and often too risky and expensive) to migrate enterprise databases with a lot of business processes.