Improvements to locking when updating primary rows   Updating a non-key column in a primary row and modifying foreign rows referring to that row no longer interfere with each other. For example, in the sample database, a sales_order row can be added while the corresponding customer address is being updated, without one operation having to wait on the other. See sa_locks system procedure and Objects that can be locked.

Reduced locking at isolation levels 2 and 3   Read locks on individual rows are no longer obtained when a table is locked in share mode (LOCK TABLE...IN SHARE MODE statement). This can result in reduced locking overhead at isolation levels 2 and 3.

Improved index performance   SQL Anywhere 12 includes enhanced algorithms and a new on-disk layout to improve the performance of deleting large numbers of clustered sequential values from an index.

Improved validation performance   SQL Anywhere 12 includes many enhancements to improve the validation of large databases.

Improved request prioritization   SQL Anywhere 12 has been enhanced to boost the priority of I/0 bound requests, which results in better utilization of hardware resources.

Improved remote data access performance   SQL Anywhere 12 includes many enhancements to improve remote data access performance, including improved proxy table performance.

New cost model   SQL Anywhere 12 includes a CPU cost model that more accurately estimates query execution costs on modern hardware. This behavior may cause changes to access plans for some queries.

Enhancement to queries embedded in user-defined functions   SQL queries embedded in user-defined functions can now be in-lined by the query optimizer, which avoids a procedure context switch with each invocation and provides the optimizer with new degrees of freedom with which to optimize the statement.

Improvements when converting expressions to different data types   Improvements have been made to the evaluation rules the database server uses when converting an expression to a different data type. The new evaluation rules make the conversion more efficient to execute.