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SAP and MySQL Join Forces
An anonymous reader writes "Heise Online is reporting that SAP and MySQL are going to cooperate (German article, you may want to use Google's translation). Short summary: MySQL and SAP are going to develop a new database server. 'The primary responsibility for the development and product management is with MySQL' says SAP spokesperson Karl-Heinz Hess. Until the new database is released, SAP will continue to develop its own free database system SAP DB, however it will now use the MySQL brand name." On a related note, IBM is introducing a low-end version of DB2.
Isn't SAP the database formerly known as Abadas? I was under the impression that it was already vastly superior to MySQL. What exactly is MySQL contributing to this?
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I don't see how this would benefit SAP.
Then again, at work I'm just a normal office worker, and don't get to see the inner periphelas of SAP - I'm just using it.
This might be a good move, however, as SAP databases are (if I remember correctly) quite large. Two large corporations working together on one databse should benefit all of us - It sure beats competition database to database. In some time, we'll see how much impact such a cooperation will have on large-scale databases. Maybe complex operations in SAP will be faster at that time. We'll just have to wait and see.
Glad to see such a movement between the two companies. Older ./ story here
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http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/02/08/0
Every Super Villan uses Linux.
Despite SQL guru (and number 2 to Ted Codd) Chris Date stating that it's pronounced S-Q-L, because "SEQUEL" was an earlier database language ?
I didnt know the loosing the ability to have foriegn keys and the ability to easily define functions and data types was an improvement. Why would anyone want to move from a database to a suped up version of Excel.
SAP is one of the biggest businesses in the world. Basically they are business consultants that re-form businesses into more effecient forms from a workflow perspective. They do this around a central core of business process modules that are interlinked and which are well suited for integrating with customers current systems. The core of the system is their database so this is a HUGE deal. btw why would IBM hook up with MySQL, they are already the worlds biggest database vendor, unlike their OS which actually costs considerably more to maintain then they make off of it DB2 is a large profit center. DB2 is available for basically every platform that could conceivably run it, from VMS, to S/390, Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
everybody seems to have heard of IBM DB, Oracle, or Microsoft SQLServ
Shouldn't that be everybody who knows about databases?
SAP is one of the tree big players on the ERP,CRM,HRM(or whatever TLA they use now). I suspect that more users know that they use SAP than that they know which database there ERP program uses.
I hope MySQL doesen't change too much...
It a easy to use, psudo-database thats really fast.
It's not a real database - but it's two strength (ease and speed) make it ideal for many projects.
I love PostgreSQL for all sorts of real database reasons, but for some tasks MySQL is superior (like PHP websites).
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
So how should we refer to it?
funny thing is, they FUD the GPL on their own site, basically saying that if you write a commercial app that uses MySQL you HAVE to buy the commercial version.
Last I checked, trying to limit the scope of use of software covered by the GPL was in fact a violation of the GPL.
but MySQL is a favored child, so the FSF says nothing.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Indeed it's very difficult to become a SAP consultant. What you say is not a theory but a basic economic law. The more a market is difficult enter, the more you can keep your prices high. A market with low entry barriers becomes quickly a commodity market and prices are droved towards production costs. This is why MS and the like intentionally introduces artificial barriers into their Markets, one of the most famous example is Word data format.
The SAP people have been utterly silent on the SAPDB list.
I guess that tends to confirm this story, though for myself (and this is the view expressed by everyone who's commented on the SAPDB list) I can't see how this works technically. The two systems are virtually nothing alike, for all they both speak SQL.
Worse, if true, this is far from the right way to treat the user community that has grown up around SAPDB. In that they found out about this in the Heise story--just like Slashdot.
Not nice.
For the past 2 years, it's seemed like there was a slow process of opening-up on the SAPDB list. The internal SAP developers finally this year provided external CVS access, and although they still seemed to value the fact that the code was difficult for non-SAP people to understand and work on--riddled with strange interfaces like COM migrated to Unix sans comments, and intentionally undocumented areas--I got the sense that things were improving.
For all the above, SAPDB as a project felt (perhaps due to its status as the less-known, more featureful GPL'd dbms) like a community resource that _came from_ a company, rather than like the property of a company you can download for free, which is how I've always seen mysql.
I still can't figure out what to feel about the vaporware merger of the systems, with development done by (yikes!) the Mysql folks, who a few years ago said we had no nead for transactions...
Matt
Most seem to be missing the point here. SAP is pretty committed to being platform agnostic and standards compliant. The main R/3 ERP runs on NT, AIX, HP-UX, OS390, Solaris, Linux etc and databases such as SQL server, DB2, Oracle, Informix and SAPDB
SAP sells to the users management, not the IT department, and have you tried to dictate to them what platform to run? Especially a big corporate data centre with mainframes etc.
If you ask SAP for a recommended platform for a component, they'll tell you to use one of the supported platforms and not a specific vendor. That's how they maintain the relationships with all vendors like MS, IBM and Oracle.
SAP has been making a concerted effort to support linux (well Red Hat) for about five years and almost all components are supported, I only know of one in beta and not supported for productive use. If there is demand to run on linux, then they will meet that demand. The last thing they want is to be only MS or IBM, cutting off potential sales and the associated TCO issues affecting the product's sales viability.This becomes especially important as they approach market saturation in the Fortune 1000 space and look towards SME's.
This could represent a big opportunity to the open source community as SAP spends serious $$$ on platform support and R&D (not games consoles and Bluetooth Keyboards). SAP support of an Open Source database WILL give the platform some serious datacentre cred.
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
MySQL and SAP join forces (...) trying to turn MySQL into a real database and SAPDB into a modern application. Maybe in two-three years we'll see MySQL and SAP releasing a software that does what PostgreSQL and Interbase already features today, and have been for several years.
Also noticed that silence of the SAP people on the list (some annoyed users indeed filled the silence ...).
... so perhaps these people are just as 'impressed' as
...) That 'build from source' looks nice in theory, and a well autoconfiscated package makes the impression that some real magic is going on. But there is no magic, just a little bit 'automagic'.
...
with some noise
Having been in a big company and seen similar events perhaps this is a corporate communication thing - software developers are usually not the people that do the communication stuff
the community, but cannot show that.
Anyway, indeed it is a bad move. These two products have not much in common, except that they speak some kind of SQL.
It's also true that the source and the build process SAP DB have is a hassle, compared with usual Open Source standard automake/autoconf. But, how many *users* would actually want build such a beast (was about 100MB source code, as I remember)? (And which of these users would *guarantee* to his boss that he oversees all things that might been wrong when building just because a wrong compiler patch level or a similar nasty thing
So, there are better things to be proud of than of 'ey it compiles on all known bitty boxes'. For a database product, things like raw devices, online backup, being reorganisation free, or being able to munch terabytes of data are an issue.
It would be also of course interesting (if that rumor will come out to be true to some extent)
to hear what will become of SAP DB's various interfaces when they 'join the forces' - MySQL has that virulent GPL, SAP DB yet has LGPL interfaces
(and most code also).
There is no good and no bad in this story - both
SAP DB and MySQL have scenarios they are well suited for. But, to repeat it, they have not much in common. I fear both will get dropped on the floor finally if this goes on
A SAP mySQL merger/technology sharing agreement (what have you) makes a lot of sense for both groups. SAP's database is robust, and offers features that mySQL does not. msSQL is popular. msSQL could gain quite a bit of big-time features from SAP's DB (real tansactions, ACID compliance, etc.)SAP gains mind share and a real developers community (which equals growth and continuation of the platform.) IMHO it's a good fit. jd
MySQL is pretty professional enough for us.
We have MySQL managing a 30+GB dataset with InnoDB tables, receiving approximately 700 queries/second average.
It's running on a dual P3-1.4GHz with 2GB of RAM on 36GB RAID-1 array. We're about to replace it with a dual P4-Xeon at 2.4Ghz, 3GB of RAM, and two 72GB RAID-5 volumes.
It operates 24/365.
- MySQL contributes "name recognition" and popularity;
- SAP-DB contributes a whole lot of functionality
Correspondingly, they also may have some ability to cover one anothers' weaknesses:- Compiling SAP-DB is, as you say, nearly impossible.
- MySQL has some severe functionality deficiencies from the perspectives of anyone accustomed to DBMSes with mature transaction support, relational capabilities, and support for SQL features that go beyond minimal "entry level" stuff.
Of course, the code bases are presently entirely separate, so that ripping things down to build them back up is likely to be a multi-year project. Compare with Mozilla; when its source was "opened," they had to rip out all sorts of code from Rogue Wave, The Open Group, and others, and the results weren't useful until a LOT of work got done.The code base is exceedingly obscure, and having the MySQL folk do some work on it may relieve that problem somewhat.
SAP-DB has fairly mature answers for all those deficiencies.
In that interim, "mindshare competitors" such as PostgreSQL and Firebird ("the database, not the web browser" :-)) aren't likely to stand still, so it seems likely to me that a major result will be for them to get a lot more popular.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
At any rate, the "platform politicking" was a big deal. That was the same year when MSFT was heavily marketing that Windows NT was an excellent platform for running R/3. At that point, on Oracle, because it wasn't 'til about '97 or '98 that Microsoft's version of Sybase became supported.
The richly entertaining part was that Microsoft wasn't "eating their own dogfood," even though they were promoting it, heavily. It would have been a marketing disaster had they run their system on Unix + Oracle, so they sidestepped it by initially going with IBM AS/400 + DB/2. And then invested heavily in the systems integration projects to get R/3 to run on Windows NT + MS SQL Server.
If you search the web, you'll have a HARD time finding any evidence of the AS/400 installation; that's the sort of information that Microsoft's "Winston Smiths" would be expected to work overtime to expunge from public record...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.