On the sybase-l mailing list,
Sybase
Jeff Tallman replied to a question on how to avoid unnecessary reorgs. He graciously agreed to let me post his response here 
You can avoid most (if not all) of the reorgs by doing:
- setting the exp_row_size to something that covers about 90% of the space each row takes up
- changing enable housekeeper GC to a 4 or 5
Both of these are a *MUST* do for DOL (datapages or datarows). See manuals on ‘enable housekeeper GC’ for correct setting of 4 or 5 (refers to whether deletes are batch or OLTP).
You can also watch for housekeeper overflows in monEngine/monOpenObjectActivity……and if you see any HKGC pending – wait a few before shutting down.
Jeff wrote up an excellent article, Locking Redux – APL vs. DOL and Tuning, that goes into detail why this is the case.
I was able to move
a VMware Server 2.0 (v7) vm to VMware ESX.. it was a *live* copy where I performed a Windows Volume Shadow copy of the vm files. Everything worked for the most part but because the database, Sybase ASE 15.0.3, was running when the shadow copy was made, we had corruption in one database. Restore from backup and all is good.
Now we need to get an updated license file from Sybase as the NIC mac address has changed.. You can *not* use the mac address from the VMware Server on ESX. grr.
Twenty hours for the volume shadow copy to complete plus another 12 hours to scp the files to the esx box (esx console access is sloooow). Keep in mind that the host VMware Server box was rebooting itself randomly so I really couldn’t leave it alone. Then 3 hours to convert/clone the vmdk files and 2 hours to correct the database… I’m tired.
It turned out to be an issue with allocating 3.75GB to a VM that was causing the rebooting. Dropping it to 2 GB resolved the rebooting… who knew? Nothing in Google and VMware Support wasn’t able to find anything on their side.
I asked Jeff Tallman if I could redistribute his excellent MDA posters for Sybase’s ASE 15.5 database server. He said yes so … here they are in both Adobe PDF and Sybase PowerDesigner PDM formats!
Jeff Tallman also provided us with the MDA posters for Sybase 15.0.3 last year.
