Adaptive Server Enterprise is based on the client/server model. Adaptive Server communicates with its clients over the network via the Tabular Data Stream™ (TDS) protocol. The client process may execute on one machine and communicate with a database server on the same or a different machine.
Adaptive Server runs as an application on top of an operating system. The hardware that the operating system runs on is completely transparent to Adaptive Server which sees only the operating system's user interfaces. You can configure multiple processes (engines) to enhance performance on multiprocessor systems.
Adaptive Server is divided into two components, a DBMS component and a kernel component. The kernel component uses the operating system services for process creation and manipulation, device and file processing, and inter-process communication. The DBMS component of Adaptive Server manages the processing of SQL statements, accesses data in a database, and manages different types of server resources.