Adaptive Server version 12.0 improves the storage format for text and image datatypes. Changes to the storage format are transparent to end-user applications, but they enable Adaptive Server to perform random access when querying data. This improves query performance over earlier versions, which had to access text and image data sequentially.
The new storage format for text and image datatypes also enables Adaptive Server to asynchronously prefetch the data into an existing buffer pool. You can fine-tune the prefetch settings for text and image data using the sp_configure parameter text prefetch size. See the System Administration Guide for more information about text prefetch size.
