I would check out the dbvalid utility. You can call that externally or you can validate the database from Sybase Central.

From the SQL Anywhere 12 Help file...

With the Validation utility, you can validate the indexes and keys on some, or all, of the tables and materialized views in a database. You can also use the Validation utility to verify the database file structure to ensure that all pages in the database belong to the correct object, and that page checksums are correct. By default, dbvalid validates all the tables, materialized views, and indexes in the database and validates the database file structure.

When validating a table, dbvalid also validates all of the table's indexes to verify that the set of rows and values in the table matches the set of rows and values contained in each index. All BLOBs in the table are also traversed, BLOB allocation maps are verified and orphaned BLOBs are detected. The Validation utility also checks the physical structure of all index pages, the ordering of the index hash values, and the index's uniqueness requirements (if any are specified). Unless the -fx option is specified, each foreign key value is looked up in the corresponding primary key table to check that referential integrity constraints are intact.

When the -i option is specified, dbvalid validates each index in the object-list. Validating an index works exactly the same as validating a table, except that only the specified index and its underlying table are validated. If the index is a foreign key, each value is looked up in the primary key table unless the -fx option is specified.

If you start database validation while the database cleaner is running, the validation does not run until the cleaner is finished running. See sa_clean_database system procedure.

To run the Validation utility, you must have either DBA or VALIDATE authority.

You can also access the Validation utility in the following ways:

From Sybase Central, using the Validate Database Wizard. See Validate a database.

From Interactive SQL, using the VALIDATE statement. See VALIDATE statement.

The Validation utility can be used in combination with regular backups to give you confidence in the integrity of the data in your database. If you want to validate a backup copy of your database, it is recommended that you make a copy of the backup and validate the copy. Doing this ensures that you do not make changes to the file that is used in recovery. See Backup and data recovery.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Gibson
Intercept Solutions - Sybase SQL Anywhere OEM Partner
Nashville, TN

What version are you using?

If you are using v10 or above and prefer to use a GUI, you can use Sybase Central to setup a "maintenance plan". This is an automated task (with SQL Anywhere, called an "event") than can be setup to run validation and/or backup on a regular schedule.

Cf. the docs.

There is an internal mechanism which can detect bit changes on the underlying storage system. You can switch on database page checksums which will be evaluated each time a page of the db file is read from disk. See the Checksum option of the Create Database statement. Refer to Using checksums to detect corruption

Remeber, that Checksums are turned off by default in 11.0.1, so you have to explicitly enable this feature. In 12.0.1 they are turned on by default.

For version 8, there is no support for maintenance plans (which are simply a GUI-based facility to create/maintain backup/validation events). However, the underlying gear does exist in v8, too (with some differences to newer versions, as usual...).

So you can do validation in several ways:

1. Use the DBVALID utility (as others have suggested) - it runs as a separate executable and can be embedded in batch files.
2. Use the VALIDATE TABLE and VALIDATE INDEX statements (or the sa_validate() system procedure which validates all tables) - these are SQL statements and can be run in a SQL batch or stored procedure.
3. Incorporate the SQL statements from 2. in an event to make them run automatically on a regular schedule (so that no explicit connection is needed).

The v8 help does contain samples for all of these tasks.