Four things I have learned about Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise in the last two weeks:

1. It (or its JDBC driver) really doesn't like you putting 'null' in a CLOB column.
2. It (or its JDBC driver or it's Hibernate dialect) is far less forgiving than many other databases of you using java.util.Date in queries in place of the java.sql.* equivalent
3. It is far less forgiving than many other databases of you referring to a column in an order-by clause in lower-case when you used upper-case in the select part
4. It seems to be designed to keep certified Sybase DBAs in full employment, and not run at all without one around to hold its hand. For example, rather than defaulting to grabbing disk space when it needs it like most sane databases, Sybase requires that you learn how to manually assign static chunks of disk to the database before you can create a database bigger than 2Mb.