ASA is a fully featured DBMS with transactional integrity, automatic rollback and recovery, declarative RI, triggers and stored procedures.

While it comes out of Sybase's "Mobile and Embedded" division, it is NOT limited to "small, desktop applications". There are many ASA implementations supporting over 100 concurrent users. While not as scalable as ASE, it does offer SMP support and versions for various Unix flavors as well as Netware and NT/w2k. Multi-gigabyte databases are commonly used.

ASA offers a number of features that are not to be found in ASE:

* row level BEFORE and AFTER triggers

* long varchar and BLOB up to 2 gigabytes

* varchar up to 32k

* declarative RI with cascade actions

* all character and decimal data is stored var-len, using only the space

it needs