Whatever database corruption you might have seen was NOT caused by an abnormal shutdown... there must have been some other cause. The automatic recovery process has been part of SQL Anywhere forever and ever, and it works flawlessly... if it didn't, there would be hundreds of trouble reports every single day because database servers are abnormally terminating all the time.
This is an important point, because saying "automatic recovery does not work" is like saying "primary key integrity does not work"... automatic recovery is one of the main reasons people use databases instead of ordinary files.
Here is an excerpt from the SQL Anywhere 6 Help (it looks exactly the same in version 16):
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The automatic recovery process
When a database is shut down during normal operation, the database server carries out a checkpoint so that all the information in the database is held in the database file. This is a clean shutdown.
Each time you start a database, the database server checks whether the last shutdown was clean or the result of a system failure. If the database was not shut down cleanly, it automatically takes the following steps to recover from a system failure:
1 Recover to the most recent checkpoint
All pages are restored to their state at the most recent checkpoint, by copying the checkpoint log pages over the changes made since the checkpoint.
2 Apply changes made since the checkpoint
Changes made between the checkpoint and the system failure, which are held in the transaction log, are applied.
3 Rollback uncommitted transactions
Any uncommitted transactions are rolled back, using the rollback logs.
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