Esther, if you have the time, pls indulge my ignorance a bit and let me NOT help you in solving your current problem...
Sybase ASE is a RDMS, which according their website, "...is a high-performance relational database management system for mission-critical, data-intensive environments". I suspect this is a lot of marketing words thrown together.
So, why should I use Sybase instead of any of the other "high performance" RDMSes out there?