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the U SAP AT RIOT act

is that a new London/Broadway Tim Rice play about an overpriced software company that makes customers break into a riot ?

That's simply not true. I have been intimately involved with the PeopleSoft/Oracle bid, and I can tell you had PeopleSoft not put the customer protection plan in place, it's sales would have collapsed following the bid.

When Oracle first announced it was to acquire PeopleSoft, it said it would close it down. Big corporate customers literally could not buy PeopleSoft software with the sword of "no support" hanging over them. With the product roadmap taken away, they delayed purchasing or went to SAP.

PeopleSoft was left with a dilemma, offer some reassurance to customers who wanted to buy its software or watch sales wither. (In which case, Oracle would probably have withdrawn its bid having seen a competitor's sales collapse.)

We may not like the way PeopleSoft tried to evade Oracle's clutches, but - as far as customer assurance went - it really had no choice, either for its shareholders or its customers.

Disclaimer: up until August '04, I was a stock analyst advising fund managers on the software industry.

Well, I think they do have a point there... there is plenty of competition around in the database market, and Oracle would still have to compete in a 'real' way - as far as I can see they can't be able to abuse their market position, simply because there's enough competition.

I once had the opportunity to talk with one of the founders of SAP. He was telling me that when they started their business, people considered it a really strange idea to sell a piece of standardised software. At that time software was tailored for every single customer. Some components for these unica were retrieved from huge open source code archives (open archive not open source).

Does the solution really need to be open source or just something that is platform independant? If it is the latter, have you thought about SAP? While I don't know exactly all of the platforms that they run on, they do offer an ASP solution.

If you a worried about price, however, look somewhere else!

SAP

* Gives you all the functionality you asked for (and more).
* Server app runs on linux.
* Client UI runs is cross-platform (Java).

It's definitely not free but you said you're willing to pay for the platform..

The E in ERP does stand for Enterprise, but that's more for marketing the name than anything. What the products actually aim to provide is a toolset for planning all of the resources managed by an organization.

A good ERP system when implemented to support solid business processes can drastically improve a company's productivity and operating efficiency. This is true for small, medium and large companies. The reason that most people associate ERP with LARGE corporations is because they typically implement a tier 1 ERP such as Oracle, SAP or JDE, which are the most well known (and expensive).

There are tons of small and mid-sized organizations that employ less well-known ERP systems. In fact these days it's damn near impossible to grow from small to mid-size without implementing at least a portion of an ERP system. This is why it is so important to have open source projects like Campiere. Trust me, the small companies do NOT have tons of cash to throw around (i.e. they are not evil).

The funny thing about ERPs though is that they have become largely Resource Tracking systems rather than planning systems (with the exception of production planning, which stems from MRP). The actual planning job is left to solutions that sit on top of the ERP like Cognos Enterprise Planning, Analytic Applications and SAP xApps.

Right, big tech companies obviously avoid Linux -- say big tech companies like:

• IBM
• SAP
• HP
• Oracle
• Dell
• Intel
• AMD
• Sun

Or which big technology companies were you referrring to exactly? Sure, it was a troll, but hey -- who isn't supporting Linux that doesn't make a competing OS? I mean, heck Sun, HP and IBM do make competing OSes and they've all jumped on the Linux bandwaggon.

What for? There's absolutely no need to buy a license to install it.

I'm not trolling, I just think the MySQL license is a lot more stringent than you imply. The MySQL license requires a commercial license if the user "distributes" the software, "be that internally or externally".

What exactly does "internal distribution" mean? Downloading MySQL and installing on multiple servers within a company is surely "internal distribution", isn't it? Creating software as a contractor and then installing MySQL at the client site surely constitutes distribution, doesn't it?

Some people maintain so, and I'm genuinely confused--could you enlighten me? See this point and this one.

What for? There's absolutely no need to buy a license to install it.

I'm not trolling, I just think the MySQL license is a lot more stringent than you imply. The MySQL license requires a commercial license if the user "distributes" the software, "be that internally or externally".

What exactly does "internal distribution" mean? Downloading MySQL and installing on multiple servers within a company is surely "internal distribution", isn't it? Creating software as a contractor and then installing MySQL at the client site surely constitutes distribution, doesn't it?

Some people maintain so, and I'm genuinely confused--could you enlighten me? See this point and this one.

Like SAP?

It appears from my googling this space is dominated by crappy software that requires the use of IE for the application and only run on Windows. This and the Intuit offerings are prime examples of places where windows is being used where it had better not be used, and poorly written software is requiring data which should be well-secured to be placed in an environment where security is eliminated. Indeed it might bear looking into from the various developers here. If someone can save these guys money and give them a proven solution, they will be rather rich and will have done a good thing.

I know about Gnucash, I support its development, and hope it eclipses all Intuit has to offer. However I see the parent is right w/r/t Insurance Agency software, and I would suspect travel agency software is still as scary and abysmal as it was years ago when I looked into it.

All we had to do to get 'approval' was do proof-of-concepts. Now that HP Omniback (aka DataProtector) supports Liunx, SAP runs on Linux, and we can do 95% of our job on the desktop using Linux we are past the sneaking in. Linux is still a pain to configure due to the many flavors. I also wish tools/applications would install easier. We'd don't have DLL hell as much as we used too - now we have gcc hell!

I imagine that if your big boss man has never heard of SAP, better start looking for another company. SAP produce ERP software (Enterprise Resource Planning). This kind of software manages just about every aspect of a business, including billing, orders, inventory, salaries, etc etc... In short, almost every company worth anything uses it (I believe the count was something like 97 out of Fortune 100) and installation costs run up to tens of millions of your favourite currency. SAP also happens to be one of the biggest software companies in the world.

You can use their software with another database (usually Oracle or DB2) running on a separate server, which many businesses do, in order to consolidate all their database tasks together. You can also use SAP-DB, SAP's own SQL database with decades of testing behind it. It just happens that SAP AG released it under the GPL about a year or so ago. Don't underestimate it.

For me, the lack of debian packages (and, indirectly, the fact that it doesn't use "normal" paths and autoconf/automake) is a major reason why I haven't tried it out. For example, look at this message about using sapdb on a debian system.

It took me a while to find a clear and concise link. Here it is.

Looks like a pretty ugly violation of privacy.

mySAP has been running on
Linux for quite some time now.
But perhaps that's nothing for small businesses ;-).

Make me something that doesn't suck,and I'll pay for it, don't force me to upgrade every 20 minutes to a more bloated piece of crap...

Unfortunately, if I write software that doesn't suck, doesn't need patches, and does what you want, you'll buy one copy (Netware 3, WinZip, Eudora) and in 2 years I'll be bankrupt.

If I write software with tons of broken features and requiring constant upgrades for 'compatibility' and security (SAP, QuickBooks, and Windows 95), I'm guaranteed plenty of repeat customers.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go buy a $100 ink cartridge for my $30 printer.

But [Oracle is] still a thousand times better than all the Open Source "alternatives".

All? There are only two things you need out of a DBMS: ACID and speed. (Yes, I know they're both also names of recreational drugs.) Oracle (proprietary license with expen$ive royalties and an NDA on performance measurement) supports ACID. So does PostgreSQL (BSD license). So does SAP DB (GPL/LGPL).

But [Oracle is] still a thousand times better than all the Open Source "alternatives".

All? There are only two things you need out of a DBMS: ACID and speed. (Yes, I know they're both also names of recreational drugs.) Oracle (proprietary license with expen$ive royalties and an NDA on performance measurement) supports ACID. So does PostgreSQL (BSD license). So does SAP DB (GPL/LGPL).

SAP has posted three success stories of companies running SAP on Linux: Penguin Computing, Siemes Business Services and InterComponentWare. Unfortunately I can't read them because Acrobat Reader won't work on this stupid computer I'm working at right now, so I don't know how exactly they use Linux.

You can find the links to the documents at http://www.sap.com/linux/.

Michael, SAP/DB is free, and transaction safe, and hence recoverable if the machine crashes. Might be worth checking it out. It's GPL, too.

Cheers!

Yeah, like the GPL:ed SAP DB for example.

//Johan

Nobody seems to have noticed SAP DB becoming Open Source last year, but it too is powerful and reliable and includes full transaction support.

Nobody seems to have noticed SAP DB becoming Open Source last year, but it too is powerful and reliable and includes full transaction support.

Nobody seems to have noticed SAP DB becoming Open Source last year, but it too is powerful and reliable and includes full transaction support.

A lot of commercial apps have plugins for whatever DB you want to use. Once they wise up and provide plugins for DBs like RedHat DB, Postgres, MySQL and so on, we'll start to see higher market saturation.

The second thing which will help is when we get more commercial apps ported to Linux.

This is already happening. The product I use every day - SAP is available (commercially) for Linux. They support all the big DB vendors including Oracle, MSSQL (ok, not on Linux), Informix, DB2, and their own (open source) database SAPDB.
I'm doing my bit, my site runs on PHP/MySQL.

I wonder if it was just a loose tranlastion and they ment ERP software. I know that IBM has a partnership with SAP now (SAP's preferred database is now DB2), and with SAP making it's own sapdb code open source, as well as offering Linux demos of their software. Makes me wonder if IBM (et al) are going to make a run at Oracle and M$ for ERP dominance using some sort of new Red Hat platform.
-------
All words in this post are just words. Any resemblance to actual phrases was unintentional.

Here's the timeline

The development toolkit was released in February. What they're releasing now is the database kernel.

SAP recently (CBit 2000 & 2001) released a couple of CDs containing free (90 day freely-renewable license) version of SAP R/3 on Linux, and their new Web Application Server, also on Linux.

Both 'Testdrive' CDs can be obtained either as ISOs from the SAP ftp server here (R/3 BASIS on Linux) and here (WAS on Linux).

Alternatively, for those without big fat pipes can order the CDs from SAP Shop

Both these demos use SAPDB as the underlying repository for storing ABAP programs at their associated data.

There's some documentation supplied with the CDs. In addition there's a wealth of documentation about SAP AGs products at help.sap.com.

I have a couple of forums on my website for discussion of these products. Feel free to drop by sapstuff.com, and visit the TestDrive CDs Discussion forum or the BASIS Forum (BASIS is the term for the underlying technology which the SAP applications use).

SAP recently (CBit 2000 & 2001) released a couple of CDs containing free (90 day freely-renewable license) version of SAP R/3 on Linux, and their new Web Application Server, also on Linux.

Both 'Testdrive' CDs can be obtained either as ISOs from the SAP ftp server here (R/3 BASIS on Linux) and here (WAS on Linux).

Alternatively, for those without big fat pipes can order the CDs from SAP Shop

Both these demos use SAPDB as the underlying repository for storing ABAP programs at their associated data.

There's some documentation supplied with the CDs. In addition there's a wealth of documentation about SAP AGs products at help.sap.com.

I have a couple of forums on my website for discussion of these products. Feel free to drop by sapstuff.com, and visit the TestDrive CDs Discussion forum or the BASIS Forum (BASIS is the term for the underlying technology which the SAP applications use).

SAP recently (CBit 2000 & 2001) released a couple of CDs containing free (90 day freely-renewable license) version of SAP R/3 on Linux, and their new Web Application Server, also on Linux.

Both 'Testdrive' CDs can be obtained either as ISOs from the SAP ftp server here (R/3 BASIS on Linux) and here (WAS on Linux).

Alternatively, for those without big fat pipes can order the CDs from SAP Shop

Both these demos use SAPDB as the underlying repository for storing ABAP programs at their associated data.

There's some documentation supplied with the CDs. In addition there's a wealth of documentation about SAP AGs products at help.sap.com.

I have a couple of forums on my website for discussion of these products. Feel free to drop by sapstuff.com, and visit the TestDrive CDs Discussion forum or the BASIS Forum (BASIS is the term for the underlying technology which the SAP applications use).

SAP recently (CBit 2000 & 2001) released a couple of CDs containing free (90 day freely-renewable license) version of SAP R/3 on Linux, and their new Web Application Server, also on Linux.

Both 'Testdrive' CDs can be obtained either as ISOs from the SAP ftp server here (R/3 BASIS on Linux) and here (WAS on Linux).

Alternatively, for those without big fat pipes can order the CDs from SAP Shop

Both these demos use SAPDB as the underlying repository for storing ABAP programs at their associated data.

There's some documentation supplied with the CDs. In addition there's a wealth of documentation about SAP AGs products at help.sap.com.

I have a couple of forums on my website for discussion of these products. Feel free to drop by sapstuff.com, and visit the TestDrive CDs Discussion forum or the BASIS Forum (BASIS is the term for the underlying technology which the SAP applications use).

According to the official SAP DB FAQ:

• SAP DB is different from ADABAS. In July 1997 and May 1999, SAP made agreements with Software AG for the right to sell the SAP version of the ADABAS D database, which is different from ADABAS, Software AG's established mainframe DBMS. As part of these agreements, SAP renamed its version of the software SAP DB. SAP DB has been enhanced and improved independently of ADABAS for several years.

Another FAQ entry answers the question of whether SAP is merely dumping the database on the open-source community so somebody else can clean up their old code:

• On the contrary, SAP will continue to develop and support SAP DB to drive future enhancements in cooperation with the open-source community. Leveraging database technology is important for delivering comprehensive and innovative SAP components. Basis development in Berlin contributes to the supply chain management/liveCache, knowledge management/Info DB, and SAP DB for SAP solutions among other tasks.

Also, remember that SAP makes money on consulting/support services. So SAP AG would be foolish to release it merely to pass the burden of providing support on to the community.

Whenever the subject of open source databases comes up, everyone talks about the usual suspects:

• MySQL
• Postgresql
• Occasionally, Interbase gets a mention.

No-one ever seems to mention SAP DB. I'm no database expert, and I would really like to hear what people think of it. How does it compare to MySQL, Postgresql and Interbase on features?

Every time a new technology is discovered/invented to do with people there's the silly bastard reaction that we're messing with nature (the awful unsaid meme being that humans are outside nature). Everything we do impacts on what would have happened without our efforts - we impose our will on others and animals and the universe. When we save a beached whale it probably would have died - but I think we did a good thing (although blowing it up is quite entertaining too - and i'm a vegetarian). So, really, it's not about messing with nature (the very idea of that reeks of a religious 'greater plan') but instead about what benefits the world. Medicine has proven to be a good thing - as has surgery, yet because these are ingrained we don't consider them "unnatural" anymore. Yet they extend life from an average of 40yrs to perhaps 80. Screw this 'good and short life' crap - Billy Corgan was right, it's not live fast die young, it's live fast live long.

Does living a few years longer benefit the world? Yes, it does.

"SAP DB is an open, SQL-based, relational database management system that provides high availability and performance scaling from small to very large implementations.

In addition, SAP DB goes beyond relational database technology by offering object orientation as well as support for managing unstructured data. It supports open standards including SQL, JDBC and ODBC; access from Perl and Python; and HTTP-based services with HTML or XML content. SAP DB is platform independent, so users can deploy it for a wide array of projects."

Sounds v good. Has anyone of you experts :) played with it?

SAP DB is an open, SQL-based, relational database management system that provides high availability and performance scaling from small to very large implementations. In addition, SAP DB goes beyond relational database technology by offering object orientation as well as support for managing unstructured data. It supports open standards including SQL, JDBC and ODBC; access from Perl and Python; and HTTP-based services with HTML or XML content. SAP DB is platform independent, so users can deploy it for a wide array of projects. Since 1994, the SAP e-Business Solution is available on SAP DB technology. Today SAP DB is being used by nearly 800 customers. On October 5, 2000, at Linux World SAP DB was announced to be made available as Open Source software using the GNU General Public License for the database kernel and the GNU Lesser General Public License for clients and programming interfaces.

Take a look at InterBase from Borland/Inprise as well. I quote from the product overview :

Versioning Architecture for ultimate concurrency readers never block writers.

Active database, including the most full featured trigger and stored procedure implementation.

Event Alerters - React to database changes without polling. Exceptional ANSI SQL-92 compliance and full UNICODE support.

Rich data types - Blobs, multi-dimension-al arrays.

InterClient - all-Java JDBC driver for low maintenance.

Designed for business critical distributed database environments, InterBase provides power and flexibility for Internet, mobile, and embedded database applications.

Scalable from Windows 95/98, Linux, HP/UX, Solaris, and other UNIX systems.

INTERBASE SPECIFCATIONS

Integrity

• Declarative Primary Key
• Declarative Foreign Key
• Cascade Declarative Referential Integrity
• Domain and column-level Check constraints
• Trigger procedures with the following features:
  • Unlimited triggers per record change
  • Invoked before or after record insertion, deletion, or update
  • Multiple triggers per action, optionally ordered.
  • Forward-chaining (cascading triggers)

• Optimistic locking
• Data isolation levels: read consistency, read committed, and cursor stability
• Shared, and protected lock types for explicit table-level locking

• Online backups
• Immediate recovery after failure

• Simultaneously connected databases -limited only by hardware
• Automatic distributed transaction processing via two-phase commit

See their press release here.

comments in [ ]

Translation from heise news ticker.

Message from 04.10.2000 15:43 [MEST]

SAP goes Open Source

The SAP wants to announce tomorrow on the LinuxWorld in Frankfurt [/Main], that it's data base SAP DB will be licensed under GPL or LGPL. Until now the SQL data base has been mainly used together with the flag ship of the Walldorf company, the merchandise planning and control system SAP R/3. However R3 provides interfaces to data bases like Informix, Oracle or DB2. For the first time SAP releases a bigger software project in source code. (ju/c't)

This isn't true, SAP announced first that they were going with IBM's DB2 but that lasted all of about five minutes before announcing that instead they will be using MS SQL. In fact, logging into one of their development systems right now tells me that they are using MS SQL version 7.00.699.

What they are releasing is in fact something that has been partly Open sourced beforehand and if you check on their website you will find that they have provided quite a lot of help to Linux as well as other Open Source projects.

And, no, I don't work for SAP.

It is certainly well and good that the "plumbing down below the GUI" looks like BSD, as that represents a well-understood and well-regarded set of "plumbing." That means that you get easy ports of "server side" stuff like Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl, Python, and such.

But with Apple having had some difficulty deciding what their GUI strategy would become, it's going to be a bit problematic to just plain choose a GUI. Do you go with:

• Yellow Box?

  Oops. No longer available.

• OpenSTEP?

  Oops. No longer available.

• Aqua?
• Quartz?
• Carbon?
• Cocoa?

The really critical thing about all of these options are that none of them, save, perhaps for OpenSTEP, via GNUstep , has any ability to run on any of the existing Unix-like systems.

In effect, in order to use existing Unix apps in GUIed manner on MacOS-X, you need to create a GUI from scratch and layer that on top somehow.

That may be nicely supportive of "web-oriented" applications; I'm sure WebObjects will work nicely on OS-X, as will the sysadmin tool WebMin, and so long as you've got a good web browser, that can provide a way of doing a bunch of useful things.

But that does not provide you with a port of the latest Sid Meier game, nor does it provide a way of running the latest SAP GUI.

There is. SAP's R/3, one of the most successful ERP solutions, has been ported to Linux and has done quite well in the benchmarks.

IBM at the moment is doing an SAP conversion, and I can't get Netfinity servers. Not because they don't have the parts, but because they are having SAP problems and can't ship anything.

In short ERP is pretty important.

Marc

Some links to ERP vendors and what they have to say about Linux support:

• SAP has announced Linux support and has been shipping since August 25. Their Linux page is here.
  (Check out the cool penguin :-))
• Baan does not seem to have any public plans for Linux support. (Their web site does not have a search facility so it's hard to be sure, but they seem to be a Microsoft shop.) Does anybody know differently?
• J. D. Edwards has a very frustrating site which will lead you to a search page which promises that "to find what J.D.Edwards position is on the Linux operating system, type Linux in the field below and click Search". When I did this I got "no matching documents", so I assume they don't have a position.
• PeopleSoft does not mention Linux on their site, so it is probably safe to assume that they do not support it.

So, answering my previous question, it seems like Kenwood is limited to choose between SAP and SAP.

Some links to ERP vendors and what they have to say about Linux support:

• SAP has announced Linux support and has been shipping since August 25. Their Linux page is here.
  (Check out the cool penguin :-))
• Baan does not seem to have any public plans for Linux support. (Their web site does not have a search facility so it's hard to be sure, but they seem to be a Microsoft shop.) Does anybody know differently?
• J. D. Edwards has a very frustrating site which will lead you to a search page which promises that "to find what J.D.Edwards position is on the Linux operating system, type Linux in the field below and click Search". When I did this I got "no matching documents", so I assume they don't have a position.
• PeopleSoft does not mention Linux on their site, so it is probably safe to assume that they do not support it.

So, answering my previous question, it seems like Kenwood is limited to choose between SAP and SAP.

Of course we remember the recent announcement of Linux SAP R/3.

Of course we remember the recent announcement of Linux SAP R/3.

They HAVE ported to Linux. I posted a story on this yesterday but no one at /. thought it was worth posting.... =)

The link I have is this article

Uh, all of them? Seriously, their platforms list is at http://www.sap.com/products/techno/t csm_pl.htm.