What is Holding SAP-DB Back?

Derek Neighbors queries: "The current story about MySQL 4.0 has erupted into a Postgres vs. MySQL debate. We at GNU Enterprise, who have used about all Free and Propietary databases, would like to know why exactly people arent using SAP-DB? It clearly is on par with Oracle, is GPL and frankly has an awesome support team in SAP AG. There was a PG vs SAP-DB recently. Someone else mentioned that you can get CDROMs for free. So again the question is 'What exactly is hindering a wider acceptance of SAP-DB in Free/Open Software projects?'"

Comments

Re:Oracle

[yatest5]

I know somewhere you can get cheap glass for the broken panes on your house... ;-)

Re:Why doesn't SAP use it?

[John Hasler]

If it is good wine I would by all I can at 2$ a
bottle. The problem is that more frequently then
not you do "get what you pay for" with wine and
many other things.

Heh. Reminds me of the study I read about recently where a guy swapped the labels on cheap Algerian wines and expensive French ones and offered them to a group of wine tasters. I think you can guess the results.

Re: your sig

[HiThere]

You left out that the prisoners are slaves, working at about $.20 per hour (assuming that the pay has increased since I last checked).

Ever wonder why there were so many people in the US prisons? They weren't all people that you would have despised as neighbors. Or relatives.

PostgreSQL is not on par with Oracle

[cartman]

Although PostgreSQL is vastly superior to MySQL, it is still nowhere near being on par with Oracle. Oracle has an incredible number of features that are lacking in PostgreSQL. A few of them are:

1. Hot Backups. This does NOT just mean a "consistent snapshot" as postgres provides; it implies a backup manager that can successively apply transactions from a redo log.

2. Asynchronous replication, parallel server, and hot standbys. You claim that postgres does replication however a search for 'replication' on the PostgreSQL mirrors yields no information.

3. Object-relational database features.

4. Extremely adequate documentation spanning ~30 non-overlapping books.

5. Materialized views, transaction savepoints, warehouse queries (cube, rollup), stored procedures in java...

These are just the heavily-used enterprise features; if I listed all the obscure features of Oracle, this post would be very long.

> If PostgreSQL could magically don an Oracular
> CIO-level reputation, the bottom half - or
> more - of the Oracle market would evapourate
> in a few short years.

Oracle Standard Edition is $300 per user. Most corporations would not want to "downgrade" to save $300, since their database is usually a rather criticial part of their operation.

For a webiste, however, you would have to buy an unlimited license ($15,000). For a small website, postgres is clearly a superior choice.

Re: your sig

[zulux]

That's why I make a distinction between 'Criminal Prisoners' and plain ol' 'Prisoners.' You and I probably disagree on what a true crime is, but we both can agree that there are a lot of people in prison who don't belong there. Most pot-heads and prostitues don't need to be in prison for example.

What bugs me is that is costs -$40,000 a year in taxpayer money to house a pedophile. We should be working that pehophile so hard that their work causes a net contribution into the tax coffers. If they refuse to work, then they should starve. Just like the rest of us.

Re: your sig

[HiThere]

Problem is, at $.20 an hour working 24 hours a day wouldn't pay for room and board. It's not unreasonable to require that prisoners work, it is unreasonable to pay them so little. (Of course, I have no idea how much the prison system gets paid to loan out their slaves...but it wouldn't matter.)

Prisoners aren't in a free market labor situation, so they have bargaining power. This guarantees an unfair situation, unless great care is taken to ensure otherwise (as clearly is not the case).

I feel that prisoners should be paid the prevailing wage for equivaltent work in the surrounding communities. And that after they have earned their wages, an amount up to, say, 80% might be deducted to cover the expenses for food and shelter. Then another 10% could be deducted for restitution (which would decrease their debt remaining at the end of their sentence). And the remainder would be left so that they would have some incentive besides being slapped around by the guards to do the work. And, to repeat myself, that they should never be paid less than the prevailing wage for equivalent work in the community where they were apprehended. And that there should be independant ombundsmen, partially paid for by local labor unions, to ensure this.