which clients are safe with which database engines?

[Former Member]

Which sqla clients are safe with which sqla engines?
For instance, I have a sqla 9 customer that needs a few new clients installed. Can I safely use the more easily available sqla 12 clients? Thanks, Doug

[Former Member]

Is there a table which lists acceptable client-server combinations?

[graeme_perrow]

Any client from version 6 and up should work with any server from version 6 and up. There are some features supported by newer servers that older clients cannot use (eg. version 7 clients can't do strong encryption, idle timeout over shared memory was not supported until version 11 or 12), but basic stuff should work.

One exception is that clients older than 12.0.1 cannot connect to servers running in a SQL Anywhere OnDemand environment.

[ian_mchardy]

Note that I believe Graeme's answer is correct for ODBC and ESQL, but I believe the ADO.NET driver and possibly OLE DB and SQL Anywhere JDBC driver do not necessary work across different versions (or at least not across such a wide number of different versions).

Also, be aware that if you do run into issues when connecting between an unsupported version (10.x or lower) and a supported version (currently 11.x or higher) we (Sybase) not be able to resolve it if it would require changes to the unsupported versions.

[t1950]

i've used ASA 8 clients against ASA 11 db's for a short period of time. but from what i understand, it's not recommended.

[MCMartin]

For me vice versa no problems so far. Maybe one of the engineers here will give you a more in depth answer.