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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?'"
If it's so great, why does SAP normally sit atop a different database, like Oracle or DB2?
sapdb needs a lot of effort to set up and create a
database, sometimes even worse than the magic juju you need to go through with Oracle.
What surprises me more actually is that Interbase/Firebird is not more successfull.
It is free and as simple to set up/use as mysql in my opinion, but avoids most of the
mysql limitations.
Oracle does replication and hot standby. SAP-DB doesn't. These are pretty important features in the enterprise. Therefore, SAP-DB is not on a par with Oracle. What do you do if you need to work on your primary database machine and you don't have a standby?
Subject says it all. Probably also goes for Linux, (but the argument there would probably be more
"doesn't comes (integrated) with the distribution"
If something gets included with distributions, it spreads much faster
Another thing I forgot: sapdb is unhackable. If you ever wanted
to see what unmaintainable for normal people code looks like, go no further than to sapdb.
It is incredibly bloated and complex, very crufty internally, written in a weird pascal/C++ mix
with an SAP specific format for the files, has a build system that could be
only described as ununderstandable, no comments.
It is what you would expect from a 20+ years old codebase
I'm glad the SAP Berlin guys understand it (they seem to at least), but I see not much chance to do any changes
on your own. This makes it not very useful as a free software project.
Of course it is still nice that they offer it for free, but for all practical purposes it is like a binary only download. To be fair interbase has some of these problems too, but it has still relatively nicer source than sapdb. mysql is much better in this regard.
Has anyone else noticed the mysterious blacked out sections on the SAP-DB history page? Creepy.
that SAP DB isn't supported out of the box by Java, Perl, or PHP, etc. but one quick glance shows they support Perl through DBD::ODBC, have an ODBC driver suitable for PHP, and supply a JDBC driver for Java programs.
so now i'm wondering what the catch is. too big? bloated? slow?
well, the minimum requirements on Linux list a base memory footprint of 128 MB. MySQL runs on just about the smallest box you own, and most people tinkering with MySQL are on budgets of $0, meaning, no new bigger boxes for a long, long time.
MORTAR COMBAT!
... and I've taken a look around for other RDBMSs. Maybe the problem is that it's flying a little under radar.
However, I have had the same question in relation to the open source version of Borland's Interbase, the Interbase fork - Firebird, and the hsql Database Engine.
It seems to me that the community has latched on to MySQL and PostgreSQL as -the- database solutions, and this very acceptance places them higher up the food chain. For instance, hunt around for an open source based Content Managemnet Sysytem (ala SlashCode or PostNuke), and almost invariably it has a MySQL backend.
One thing that bothers the hell out of me is that no DB out there is easier to setup and use than MS SQL server...
In my job I have used literally every DB out there and none of them are easier to setup than Microsoft. It also the easiet to use from the application side. With oracle and other db's you need to know all kinds of listener and config info about where you dbase is. With MS and a few others you just need the servername and dbname and it works. Thats how things should be.
I am quite happy with the way MySQL is coming along.. they finally have a decent admin interface and the other feature they have needed for years... now if installation and usage were just a bit easier they could really compete.
There is a strong first mover advantage to Internet applications. For example, if you want to create a online shop, there are loads of free apps, tutorials and useful mailing lists for php/mysql. There are a lot less for php/postgresql. Almost none for php/sap-db.
Unless you are a software genius, the sensible choice is the one with most support in the community. Think perl, mysql.
This creates a network effect that your expertise gets added to the pool of knowledge and thus that pool becomes even more inviting.
Taken to the next step, you see fine languages like Python and fine databases like PostgreSQL fall behind in terms of support because their pool of expertise comes from a smaller number of users. But they do fine because there are so many developers out there who love them. These tools thrive with a a certain "less popular but more excellent" feel.
Sadly, if a third player comes along some years later, then they will have a very hard time getting a following big enough to generate the pool of expertise that leads to having lots of applications. Think Ruby, SAP-DB.
And its applications that determine popularity.
That is the short answer to the question - waht is holding SAP-DB back. Excellence isn't everything - being first on the scene gives huge advantages. And they were nowhere near first...
Patrick
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Winzip will open tgz files.
I guess if you cannot figure out how to open the tgz file in Windows, it is probably better that you are not trying to install SAP. Natural selection is a wonderful thing.
The PHP comment brings up a good reason why it has not yet taken off. MySQL and other open source DBs have widespread support in applications and more importantly, developer communities. People who are comfortable developing with and even for those packages will continue to develop with and for those packages. As more community resources are available, more people will become comfortable using SAB DB.
The company I work for uses alot of open source software in it's development - both in terms off server side (linux, apache, etc) and for the application side (Tomcat, JServ, etc).
We don't use SAP-DB because:
I dare say that if we had a pressing business case to learn the extra skill (i.e. we required some of it's fetures on a project that hadn't got the Oracle budget) then we'd consider it.
Then again there are other Dbs that would also cut it in that case too.
MYSQL has a big name in terms of Open Source software and that alone may prevent people from switching from it in favour of a less well known 'brand'.
Better the pride that resides in a Citizen of the world, than the pride that divides when a colourful rag is unfurled
http://www.tripuls.de/deut/zg/prod/datenb1.htm
I think that this is what you wanted.
Being GPL is not nearly as nice as being BSD. That's a big advantage of PostgreSQL (but not MySQL). In other words, if you want to sell an application which includes an embedded DB, then GPL is no good.
As far as I know, PostgreSQL is the only truly free database (in this licensing sense).
But I could be wrong -- I'm standing by to be corrected...
the statement about sap-db being on a par with oracle has forked this conversation off into a million "how can it be on a par with oracle" comments. not the question...
one fine example of this was the boss conversation thread (this one).
the point was, its an open source database, why aren't people using it INSTEAD OF PG/MYSQL.
i tend to agree with the complexity side of things as about 3 years ago i tried getting it up and running - without much success. although, friends of mine who know pretty much nothing about unix are running a web solution on apache jakarta (jsp+servlets) using SAPDB as the databaase which they installed from RPMs. they sing its praises all day long.
maybe its the communities fear of a traditionally large $$ corporation giving away its technology?
It's "Industry Standard". /. about a MySQl update feature. People didn't give a shit.
I mentioned Firebird the other day when a guy asked
We use what we're used to, even if it's outdated or pointless. Other stuff is of no interest, Try telling a guy the advantages about Linux over WinXP and you'll know what I mean.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
while it's certainly not the reason for all installations, it's likely that a large percentage of those places already had Oracle on site and not SAP-DB. and it takes a lot of effort and several really good reasons for most companies to switch databases. few have a database for this and a different database for that and a yet still different database for something else.
It is...
1. harder to install, with a slightly strange mix of admin tools (combination of old/crufty, and new/experimental)
2. definitely trickier to manage, as you need to learn protocols for setting up, and backing up, databases and their logs, at least. This is true of other RDBMSs of course, but the trend has been toward more self-managing systems.
3. Relies of ODBC as the cli--which is actually fine (eg, compatible with PHP) but still less familiar to Unix/OSS people
4. Still undergoing stabilizing bugfix cycle, seemingly, although I haven't myself ever encountered a problem with it
5. Is, as mentioned, less tolerant of inexpert admins--and more problematic, the error codes are frequently impossible to understand
6. Really is difficult, at present, to hack. In general, the code is VERY challenging to work with (particularly the ugly, custom built build system), although it should be said that the SAP internal developers are steadily improving all aspects of the system, and a time WILL come when external developers can see rewards for their hacking efforts.
Compensating for this is the VERY skilled and responsive SAPDB development team, and a very strong feature set.
Matt
The originator of the thread should learn that technology doesn't change overnight, and certainly not without the kind of marketing budgets behind Java & C#. Change takes time.
As another answer, I'd ask what is the driving point behind SAPDB? MySQL has/had noteriety for being a very simple system; Postgres had noteriety for advanced research into ORDBMS'es as well as coming out of a university lab that produced two very successful commercial DBs in the past. What's the big focus with SAPDB? All I know so far is that it was an in-house thing that worked for SAP. No idea what that's supposed to mean to me. Maybe someone should answer that first.
Not sure what business a database has driving a tape deck directly anyway; one would hope that as far as possible the DB would let the OS figure such nightmares out. That's what OSes are for, although Oracle certainly seems to have forgotten that.
PostgreSQL does transactions, hot backups etc, would you consider switching to it?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We have been using SAP-DB on our production servers for almost a year now and I can absolutely recommend it if you are looking for a serious database.
We previously used Postgres for a long time but had two problems with it at that time:
- Postgres required daily database reorganizing (VACUUM) which was a problem in a 24/7 availability scenario
- Postgres didn't scale well beyond a few hundred concurrent database connections on SMP systems
This caused us to look for an alternative. After extensive testing with SAP-DB we decided to start using it on our production systems.
On our production systems we use both Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Solaris 8. On both setups SAP-DB has been rock-solid.
Some of our systems usually have 1000+ concurrent database connections, with all of those doing inserts and updates all the time. SAP-DB has shown that it is able to handle this kind of load without any performance or availability problems and without requiring any database maintenance.
If you are looking for a reliable enterprise scale GPL database, look no further: you'll love SAP-DB.
Main drawbacks for being a succesfull OSS project:
- source code structure takes getting used to
- database setup is quite straightforward, but documentation on getting it to work over ODBC etc. could be better, so new users would have an easier start
Last but not least, online support by the developers from SAP AG is excellent.
Jeroen Boomgaardt
Large parts of SAPDB seem to be written in Pascal, which is processed by a transpiler to generate C code. This makes debugging complicated. In addition, the whole build environment (the transpiler, the project-specific make tool, and so on) have only been released as free software quite recently. This might explain why SAPDB doesn't attract developers from the free software community, but it doesn't explain why it doesn't take the user community by storm.
I hope to be able to use SAPDB some day, if PostgreSQL ever breaks for us. Currently, there's nothing pushing us away from PostgreSQL and SAPDB lacks quite a few features we like in PostgreSQL (the extensible type system, which allows us to store IP addresses directly, for example). The documentation seems to unclear in quite a few areas, too. In addition, it seems that native (non-ODBC) backends are no longer supported by SAPDB.
PostgreSQL does replication. PostgreSQL thrashes Oracle performance-wise in many situations. PostgreSQL costs just a little less than Oracle to buy and house. PostgreSQL was one of the first kids on the GPL block. The conclusion about a niche for SAB seems pretty much inevitable.
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.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
More and more scripting languages (PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, TCL) are working through generalised DB interfaces; there is less and less difference (often none) between backend DB's from an application programmer's PoV.
In some cases the backend DB needn't even be SQL (great news for tiny high-performance web apps), but where the backend DB does stick closely to SQL standards the applications produced with it are more likely to be portable and scalable.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Does SAP have anything close to Oracle's RMAN? If not, it's not on par with Oracle. It seems like most 'free' databases put backup and recovery on the back-burner and only provide some sort of database dump for backups - which is probably one of the reasons they're not more accepted in high-level professional circles.
Marketing is of some importance, and the "other guys" have more of it. There are no books on bookstore shelves on SAP-DB. Few web sites "Powered by SAP-DB."
It's quite a different world, with very different build tools, code documented in German, and the likes. It is not something that is easy to hack on.
You can get a tarball, you can get some RPMs that work in some places, but it's not nearly as available as MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Much of the popularity of MySQL stems from there being integrated ISP tools like CPanel that include a DB manager module specifically for MySQL. Similarly, the joint popularity of MySQL and PHP stems from the groups of developers working together closely to ensure that there is good native support for MySQL in PHP.
In contrast, modules for integrating SAP-DB with Perl, Python, PHP, and the like require some degree of effort in "hacking it into place." It's not as simple as "apt-get install python-sapdb sapdb-dbi php-sapdb".
And TOra doesn't include SAP-DB support.
None of these are particularly "technical" matters indicating things that can't work.
It's not a question of "SAP-DB not being an ACID DBMS" (as some idiot claimed in another thread).
It's really largely a question of systemms integration, with a certain amount of "needs more marketing."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Bzzt! wrong again... clients don't use oracle for their support (that's what trained dba's are for), or their db. They use them for their apps.
Oracle isn't about db's, only partially about support (to sell you more apps), and most definitely 95% about their application solutions.
Oracle could switch over to postgres is they wished and except for PR issues, it wouldn't significally change their ability to supply solutions to companies that need them.
It's just that for 99.9% of companies out there the apps are just way overkill... must people can get by with postgres or mysql with custom written stuff or downloaded stuff and do just fine. Of course give the open source community a few more years and there will be off the shelf apps that will rivel those of Oracle, I'd be willing to bet.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
PostgreSQL was one of the first kids on the GPL block.
No, it was one of the first on the Open Source block, specifically it has a BSD license. And SAP-DB needs to beat PostgreSQL on several counts for it to be considered:
(a) features, PostgreSQL has them in spades, (b) stability, PostgreSQL is solid, (c) licensing, you can't beat BSD, and most importantly, (d) community, PostgreSQL's user community is just a fanstatic group of fellas.
In my experience
- pulling transaction records from a remote database results in a considerably superior solution to that obtainable with any messaging middleware product
- using duplicated "hot-standby" systems is more manageable and efficient than data replication.
So please don't dismiss PostgreSQL and SAP DB on the basis of checkboxes for features you might not want to use.i looked into sapdb over a year ago. it was hard to install. it lacked good perl support. those are both pretty huge issues.
i do find free software db's amusing though. they tend to be easier to install and manage then the closed source alternatives.
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That's not a word! You should have said "derstandable"! ;-)
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
1) Their site has a bunch of advertising hype for how wonderful the DBMS is but almost zero real content;
2) It is from and controlled by SAP. I have worked with these people in the past and I deeply distrust their code and processes;
3) Life is short. I have no time for YADB that has no compelling advantages that I can see;
4) I believe in the importance of things like replication and objrect-relational features that SAP puts down as irrelevant.
This is how it works:
1. Hot backup at 1am Sunday (database is up and running)
2. Nightly backup of archive logs (i.e they contain all the changes to a database.
That will only get you back to the time of your last backup assuming you don't have other realtime copies of your xaction logs and tables. If you're running your db on one big box with box table storage and xaction logs, if some big power surge comes along and crashes the heads of all your drives, all you can do is restore your full and add the xactions up until your last backup. Anything done since that time is gone.
Oracle has offered me free apps as an incentive to use their database over a competitors so I don't think you are correct in saying they are all about their applications. But I guess that really depends on who you talk to inside the company. A database person will have a different opinion over an applications person.
You are right about their products being overkill for most companies out there. I've called Oracle knowing exactly what license I need. Before my conversation is over they've always tried to change my requirements and sell me more than I need. They've even suggested I change my server platform to Linux so I can free up some money for buying their additional stuff. If this continues to be their practice, other solutions, maybe even open source might be an alternative for me in the future. But I can see where companies can get tricked into getting more than they need and end up with overkill for a simple solution.
'Same speed C but faster'
- The build system is so unusual, i.e. completely 'off the wall', that without investing an inordinate amount of time I could not get SAP-DB to even build. "./configure && make; su -c 'make install';" it isn't! For this dedicated OSS devotee, that was a big black cloud forming on the horizon.
- I then installed off the provided CDs via the binary route, it's difficult to believe this, especially as I have been around these dumputer things for 30 years, but I could not find out in a reasonably simple or easy way how to start the daemon! By contrast, PostgreSQL tells you exactly what incantation to offer up at the end of the build process. Big black cloud overhead!
- It needs a minimum of 128Mb. At the the time I did not have sufficient memory on the evaluation machine.
- The web page with the technical information is ( was? ) completely cuckoo when viewed with Netscape 4.x or Mozilla. It's as slow as a wet week, and the information to read is stuck down in the corner in a truly miniscule font size. I'm being drenched in a black cloud rainstorm.
After all that I said to myself, "Umm... I think I'll carry on with PostgreSQL for the time being". Unfortunately for SAP AG time is still being.I have since got a more powerful machine with enough memory to at least try it out. When I've got a spare moment, I'll have another look at it. Spare moments are not exactly thick on the ground right now, so goodness only knows when that will happen.
Q. If it's so great, why does SAP R/3 normally sit atop a different database, like Oracle or DB2?
A. R/3 was originally written for Oracle, so this is a tradition. Up until now, SAP DB hasn't been marketed actively by SAP as not to upset it's many database selling partners. Newer applications are now developed for SAP DB first.
Q. SAP-DB is 20 years old. It has an unmaintainable code base. It is bloated and complex, very crufty internally and written in a weird pascal/C++ mix witha SAP specific format for the files and an uncomprehensible build system.
A. I prefer the word challenging. Parts of it are of course constantly rewritten, so I don't think a single part is actually 20 years old. And I object aliasing '!= make' with 'incomprehensible'. The concepts are actually pretty close to newer build systems like ant. Without it, the criticism would simply read that the make files are incomprehensible.
Q. SAP-DB needs a lot of effort to set up and create a database, sometimes even worse than the magic juju you need to go through with Oracle.
A. Not really true, especially not for a production database. But the entry level documentation could be made better by describing when and how to keep things simple.
Q. Oracle does replication and hot standby. SAP-DB doesn't. These are pretty important features in the enterprise.
A. Replication is not on our agenda (despite the oddly named Replication Manager). Hot standby is currently being implemented.
Q. Not in BSD Ports tree. Probably also goes for Linux, (but the argument there would probably be more "doesn't comes (integrated) with the distribution" If something gets included with distributions, it spreads much faster.
A. True. But our main job is to supply SAP DB for SAP customers. Anything else has to be done by others interested in SAP DB.
Q. harder to install, with a slightly strange mix of admin tools (combination of old/crufty, and new/experimental)
A. Partly a documentation problem. There isn't actually a mix of old and new admin tools. There is a command based API, which is accessible from various programming languages, and there are tools which are implemented on top of this API.
Q. definitely trickier to manage, as you need to learn protocols for setting up, and backing up, databases and their logs, at least. This is true of other RDBMSs of course, but the trend has been toward more self-managing systems.
A. SAP DB is mostly self managing. Some of the tasks were it isn't have severe performance implications (like distribution of data volumes over disks) so simply picking a default is questionable at best.
Q. Relies of ODBC as the cli--which is actually fine (eg, compatible with PHP) but still less familiar to Unix/OSS people
A. There is no standard database API for Unix. But of course anything would be better than a Microsoft API.
Q. Still undergoing stabilizing bugfix cycle, seemingly, although I haven't myself ever encountered a problem with it
A. Insert lame joke about Linux 2.4.
Q. Is, as mentioned, less tolerant of inexpert admins--and more problematic, the error codes are frequently impossible to understand
A. We should probably supply a tool which makes information about the error codes easily accessible from the command line.
Q. Really is difficult, at present, to hack. In general, the code is VERY challenging to work with (particularly the ugly, custom built build system), although it should be said that the SAP internal developers are steadily improving all aspects of the system, and a time WILL come when external developers can see rewards for their hacking efforts.
A. True. Although I still object to the notion that make was presented to mankind on the mount Sinai.
Q. Does SAP have anything close to Oracle's RMAN?
A. SAP DB logs all backups. The DBMGUI can use this log to automate tasks like 'restore from this full backup to this timestamp'. This works also with external backup tools.
Q. Sect Where's the O'Reilly book on SAP-DB?
A. It took some time for PostgreSQL to get books so I guess a SAP DB book is still a year or two away.
Q. Does it have Multi Concurrency Version Control (MVCC)?
A. It is implemented in the undocumented object database part. There are plans to make this also available to the relational database part, but a release date has not been set.
Q. Are there any Free Software success stories of projects using SAP-DB?
A. So far, SAP DB seems to appeal mostly to commercial software vendors for whom Oracle or MS licenses are too expensive/bothersome.
Q. Are there better admin tools?
A. No. Or not yet. But the administration is easily scriptable, so most common tasks can be reduced to a single command.