New and enhanced expressions for the CONTAINS search condition   A new before-expression has been added to the CONTAINS search condition. Use the before-expression to perform a proximity search that respects the relative order of terms. See CONTAINS search condition.

Additionally, the near-expression has been enhanced to accept minimum distance conditions between search terms. See CONTAINS search condition.

Client messages about encryption   When a database is created using the dbinit utility or the CREATE DATABASE statement, messages are now sent to the client indicating what type of database encryption is used. If encryption is used, the algorithm being used is also displayed.

Graphical and long plans   Graphical and long plans have been enhanced to contain optimization statistics collected during the query optimization process. See Graphical plans and Long text plan.

CESU-8 support   SQL Anywhere now supports the CESU-8 character set (its alias is ibm-9400) and the CESU8BIN collation. Use the dbinit utility with the -le+ option to obtain a complete list of supported character sets. For information about supported collations, see Alternate collations.

Reserved words   The following is a list of reserved words added to the database in SQL Anywhere version 16.0. See Reserved words.

• array
• json
• row
• rowtype
• unnest
• varray

Identifiers and aliases   Identifiers and aliases can no longer contain the following characters:

• Square brackets
• Back quotes

For more information about character restrictions for identifiers, see Identifiers. For more information about character restrictions for aliases, see the select-list clause in the SELECT statement.

Named parameters   SQL Anywhere now supports the SQL/2011 named parameter syntax. The following named parameter syntax is new:

• parameter-name => parameter-value

Functions and procedures that are referenced from the CALL statement, the EXECUTE statement (Transact-SQL), the FROM clause of a DML statement, and the TRIGGER EVENT statement support named parameter syntax. Named parameters allow you to specify any subset of the available parameters in any order. For more information, see the Named parameters