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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?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...that MySQL will now simulcast in Spanish?
SAP's lack of success can be contributed to their name. Who wants to be called a "SAP"? No one! Coversely, MySQL's success is also due to its name. It's MySQL, and not YourSQL. Everyone loves owning things and calling them theirs.
A lot of code "mergers" tend to be announced, but nothing ever comes of it. The idea of a merged feature set sounds promising, but it is often difficult to merge the underlying code, which can be severely different even for features present in both code bases.
Additionally, for open-source or largely community developed projects, it's easy for the leaders to announce a merger or roadplan, but a whole 'nother game when it comes to getting the volunteer coders to actually do it; switching codebases or doing the grunt work of merges isn't the kind of this most hackers find sexy or appealing.
Point being, how much of this merger is something that's actually going to happen, how much is just a transfer of resources (versus merging of code), and so on?
"SAP and MySQL announced that they would call the new database 'MySQL Firebird'.."
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Oracle sues SAP for $1Billion dollars claiming that SAP, which had previously licenced Oracle technology, is transferring Oracle's IP to mySQL.
L.Ellison is heard saying: "There is no way that mySQL could become enterprise ready so quickly without help from SAP and through the use of Oracle's IP"
You will have to pry my proprietary software $$$ from my cold dead hands!
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.
I was kind of hoping MySQL would partner with IBM or some other high-visibility company that could deploy it at the enterprise level... you know, do for MySQL what has been done for Linux. It's a nice project, and seems to be working out pretty well here on Slashdot, but outside of that I don't think anybody is really familiar with it, which is unfortunate because I've been able to do a lot with it (OTOH, everybody seems to have heard of IBM DB, Oracle, or Microsoft SQLServ).
So, nice to see somebody else forming some kind of partnership where perhaps the companies can prop each other up marketing-wise, but doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Does this mean MySQL will now only accept SQL commands in german? That might increase the querytimes significantly....
Glad to see such a movement between the two companies. Older ./ story here
2 /1830245.shtml?tid=99
http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/02/08/0
Every Super Villan uses Linux.
...use SAP's db at their corporate site? If Microsoft still does, I can't imagine that this would help the relationship.
Goods are I, for on, delights to see this. Collaboration between information technology firms is always reception. Ears love I pieces of less important by approximately large firms as well as SAP releasing its intellectual property to the open source partnership.
include $sig;
1;
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.
This may be a low-cost gamble, considering SAP-DB is technically quite good but not very popular. MySQL still lacks a lot technically, but it sure has a big hacker following. SAP no doubt wants a piece of the enterprise DB pie and maybe they see Linux and Apache's success and think, "hell it costs peanuts to support the MySQL team and even though it's a long shot there's a slim chance we could start another revolution." Obviously this is pure conjecture but not an unreasonable explanation for what several people seem to be calling a strange move.
mysql has been getting...better. Still not really a professional product in any general sense.
How do you rate postgresql then? I'm curious.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Plus, if you've got anything with "SAP" on your CV/resume, you can get a higher-paid job.
One of my colleagues has this theory that packages with (very) high entry costs - such as SAP - attract higher pay for experience than those with low/zero entry cost - such as most open source stuff and MySQL, which anyone and their dog can download for free & run on a $100 Linux box.
Sakila?
It's true that you can make good money doing something like SAP, but you sort of have to sell your soul to it. I did it for about a year and a half, I was very good at it, etc, etc, but it was really boring. Right now I would like a job in anything, even something boring :). But since I have been out of the market for a while, I am unlikely to be able to get an SAP job. They want to know what the latest implementation job you were on was, stuff like that. They will ask for experience with a specific version, for example.
So basically, if you want to work in it, you have to keep working in it. That is somewhat true in other fields, but I think stuff like SAP is exceptional that way--very closed. Hard to get into, and hard to get back into if you've been out.
Mind you this is not because you can't just jump in and pick right back up--you can. but there's a whole mentality surrounding all the work that says "sorry, you can't come back in". So something along those lines.
Liberty uber alles.
SAP is turning the nose!
we're all doomed.
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.
That sounds like a shortcoming of the language. Languages are for manipulating data. Data does not exist so that you can have an easy time manipulating it in an inferior language (read JAVA).
t
We're using Postgres for GForge - this GForge installation has a 216 MB database. Not very big yet, but running smooth and serving up plenty of hits so far....
Yours,
Tom
The Army reading list
forget the fact that michael posted the article. It's rather an important thing to know considering how many slashdotters are responsible for one LAMP or another. MySQL being the 'M' in LAMP, you have to ask yourself: is MySQL going to kick ass through this partnership or what?
But I did like how you transformed the BSD troll (if that really is your doing), very original if so, and quite entertaining none-the-less. Still, I think this wasn't the right article to post it under.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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.
You mean something like MySQL?h tml
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-4.0.
Or do you mean like MS SQL?
216 MB, I manage a hmmm MySQL database currently at 650 MB
and running smoothly.
Personal Website
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.
Right you are, 210MB ain't much, and it's mostly base64 encoded PDF files and Powerpoint presentations and such, so the actual record count isn't very high. It's getting bigger fast though... nothing like a five year project for accumulating documents! :-)
Yours,
tom
The Army reading list
Ted Codd's only been dead a month and he's already rolling over in his grave.
And learn how to freakin' spell.
I think both companies are well aware of the potential problems. The article talks about a timeframe of several years, so don't expect anything to be released within a few months.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
There should be different classes of DBs for different purposes. You have Sleepy Cat's BerkelyDB which, from a RDBMS standpoint, is incredibly crippled, yet is uber-fast, requires little resources, and is iron-clad.
You have MySQL which is like BerkeleyDB but with more sugar, with a network-centric view, and meta-data. But it does not skimp on speed for features or safety.
I don't know if Microsoft Access is in the first class or second, I'd have to say first.
Then you have the true RDBMS, MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, and Postgres.
There is another class, object oriented databases (Versant, Intersystems Cache, ozone).
MySQL should revel in the fact that it is NOT a true RDBMS and often that isn't needed for many applications that are forced onto RDBMSs unnecessarily. A partner ship with SAP will not help, and I think it may raise the bar of expectations to high for MySQL. I just hope it's as fast and easy to deploy in the end.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
We run a smallish (2.4gb on disk, ~90 tables, a couple of 40,000,000 rows) postgres instance (actually, three, with master/slave replication and select multiplexing), and it works great. We only see about 80 transactions a minute, though, so our needs aren't really that impressive.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
not SAP.
The lot of slashdot could care less about them (myself included).
Perhaps it's a dumb move on SAP's part. Or maybe they know something we don't.
Whatever, it means more money. Hurrah.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
MySQL is a great database for smaller enterprise projects. Easy install and good pricing model.
Browse the Information Directory
SQL was indeed originally called SEQUEL; the name was an acronym for Structured English (not "English-like") Query Language. The name was subsequently changed for legal reasons.
I presume that the "legal reasons" might have been unhappy if they'd changed the spelling but kept the pronunciation !
A quotation from my (old!) 2nd edition of Date's An Introduction to Database Systems Chapter 7, The Data Sublanguage SEQUEL
The original version of SEQUEL ... was based on an earlier language called SQUARE ...
This book also contains some comments on QUEL, a query sublanguage based on relational calculus.
My two favorite:
Just in the mood of wasting bandwidth.[Pruneau
I'm sure there are, but won't you still end up needing to use the Jet driver or some equivalent via ODBC/OLEDB if you're not running a DBMS?
That is, unless you just go with storing stuff in POT (plain ole text) with standard read/writes - which has its own limitations.
It depends on the project to be sure, but MySQL is well worth the installation overhead IMO.
Sweet. Nice setup.
I'll post back here if mine gets over a couple GB... most of the space in it is consumed right here:
http://cougaarforge.cougaar.org/docman/?group_id=1 6
Lots of documentation....
Yours,
Tom
The Army reading list
Eh, I have a 85MB table. Not that it's anything heavy duty, just an apache access_log in database form, very fun for figuring out all kinds of neat statistics. Much more flexible, and much faster, than parsing a 98MB access_log. And this is only for my personal site, which is a little over a year old. 650MB? Bah. : )
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
The point is that the SAP organisation seems to have a vested interest in maintaining its air of exclusivity, every bit as much as the consultants have an interest in maintaining their salary rates.
;-)
It can appeal to its clients' snobbery, and position itself as some kind of privileged club.
Of course, once the clients are "in", they too have an interest in keeping the exclusivity, to justify costs.
I'm not saying it's a bad product (I wouldn't know - I've never been anywhere near it due to aforementioned barriers
Where are my mod points when I need them... seriously. I am sick of hearing people say that RDBMSs are crap or whatever because they can't deal with the fact that DOING HARD STUFF IS HARD.
In the development of a transactional processing system, once the volume of data becomes large and the needs for data integrity and manageability becomes overwhelming... you had soooo better be using a relational database. Object databases just aren't suited for the kind of work that is really important to the majority of applications (unless, at least, the object database is really just an access layer on top of a relational database).
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
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
Sigh, when will people realise that computers work better if you're polite, meek and gentle around them; just think how much more data would be lost without people around the world repeating words to the effect of "Please, Please don't fail until this backup's complete" when hard drives start to fail!
In this vein, I have started development of a next generation data processing language, aimed at harnessing the hugely underused power of politeness in this field, where data integrity is paramount.
Here's an example query:
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.
FileMaker Pro.
Right. But when those financials were running off of flat files on the mainframes, it was in batch-mode. You don't have to worry about transactions when you only have one thread hitting the database at a time.
This isn't any ordinary darkness. It's advanced darkness.
In the development of a transactional processing system, once the volume of data becomes large and the needs for data integrity and manageability becomes overwhelming... you had soooo better be using a relational database.
This sounds like you are giving quality-of-implementation reasons for favoring relational models above entity-relationship models.
I'd say that the relational model per se is better fitted for large data sets.
As nice as the thought of looking at everything as objects is, it just isn't flexibel enough for reality IMO.
You pay the big bucks for all the fancy ERP stuf
- 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.
But these issues aren't relevant to this thread.
The discussion is not about the "huge, complex application," R/3, it is about the database.
And in the context of R/3, the database is essentially an embedded component, a tiny part of the overall system, and one that isn't used with immense sophistication. Most big R/3 installs use Oracle, but, for the most part, not in a terribly sophisticated way. There is little if any use of "advanced stuff" like foreign keys, triggers, or stored procedures; the DBMS is used as a "data store," and isn't expected to be terribly smart.
There lies an interesting connection; that description historically describes MySQL fairly well, as a relatively unsophisticated data store. Make MySQL more robust and it might well make a nice "cheap" data store for R/3 . (Mind you, commercial licenses for MySQL cost hundreds of dollars more, per CPU, than, say, PostgreSQL...)
But the "resume connection" certainly doesn't appear to be the point...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It's easy. If it's anything at all better than MSDE, the redistributable SQL Server 2000 Lite, then companies that need to distribute a database with their product (like mine) will gladly eat it up. We would definitely pay $1000 to get a redistributable database that is better than MSDE (and as 'invisible' as possible.) I have some hopes that IBM's product may indeed be worthwhile, but I haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet.
One of the main factors is how easily and reliably it installs.
One of my company's worst problems right now is that when they try to install our product, often the MSDE version fails to install for various obscure reasons that are basically out of our control.
The customer says "what a piece of shit" and never looks at our product again. If this DB2 Express product installs rock-solid (and is a reasonable download size) then we will jump all over it.
Of course, we also ship Postgresql on all our supported Unix platforms. We also have high hopes for a future Windows version of Postgresql, but this DB2 Express product will also be available for most of our Unix platforms.
I have not yet had occasion to use MySQL or PostgreSQL in a really large database, but after moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL a couple years ago, the main thing that struck me was how much logical power it gives you. On that front, PostgreSQL wins over just about anything except maybe Oracle or DB2. I mean, you can create your own datatypes and operators if you want; how cool is that?
I think PostgreSQL is fairly robust for medium/large databases, though (depending on the kind of usage, of course), and they are focusing almost all of their development energy now on enterprise-level solutions.
The only major issues I see are such things as lack of fine-grained exception handling in transactions, nested transactions, clustering (replication is already available, though), etc... But MySQL doesn't come close to having any of these either.
See my other post here.
I'm just about to implement an advertising booking system for my small employer, which will eventually be expanded into an entire contact management solution (so is the plan, anyway :)
My employer originally wanted me to use Access [usual reasons - that's the way other companies he's seen have done it, Microsoft is great, Microsoft is wonderful, etc etc] but then I told him about the Microsoft tax and now he sees the wisdom of an open source solution :)
I was going to use a MySQL backend served by Apache/PHP hosted on our MacOSX PowerMac (I'm still at the data modelling phase at the moment) - but now I'm wondering if this SAP DB might be a better solution? I am impressed by the reputation of SAP in enterprise solutions, but from what I understand this SAP DB is strictly a RDBMS backend, not dissimilar from MySQL or the base install of Oracle.
Any thoughts?
you mean MyZilla?
Less is more !
Adding feature of a real DBMS (SAP) to MySQL will let finally call it MyGreSQL.
Less is more !
something else SAP is getting, that I didn't see commented on...
Just getting the mysql coders to RPM/DEB/PKG the software, and distribute it would probably help sapdb(not because it's hard to compile, but because packages integrate the software into the distro, and track dependencies for you, as well as providing defaults, and helpful systems administration things like startup scripts and logrotation, well the GOOD packaging systems do)
Instead of MySQL 3.23.XXX or 4.XXX or MySQL Max, I think you'll now see an addition to the MySQL line, something like MySQL Enterprise.
I doubt the folks are MySQL will roll everything into a single database. That doesn't make sense. Sybase and Oracle have personal editions of their big servers.
I suspect this is what you'll see with MySQL. 1 version without all the fancy stuff -- the 3.X line, one version with transactions -- the 4.X series and then one version with transactions, stored procedures, constraints, foreign keys, etc. -- the database formerly known as sapdb.
The users then pick the database with the features that they need. And when it's time to upsize or downsize, get a MySQL tool that lets you transfer existing databases to the next higher level server.
While SAP is one of the biggest (3rd largest software company behind Oracle and M$, #1 in ERP) the DB is not such a bug deal. See my other post. The DB is just a building block that SAP application servers use to store both runtime program strucutures and data. It's the busniess processes/logic that's HUGE.
Most SAP customers use Oracle DB. SAP competes with Oracle in the Enterprise Resource Planning space, but not the DB space.
All your base are belong to us!
SAP wants no piece of the DB market. They left years ago and havn't looked back. See these.
All your base are belong to us!
Lots of people are confusing SAP, the enterprise application software, with SAP DB, the open source database that SAP develops so customers have a free back end for the expensive SAP application software.
Oracle seems to be the most popular back end for SAP applications, but SAP doesn't trust Oracle not to try to steal its customers for Oracle's own application software. Also, the expense of Oracle's database reduces the amount a company can spend on SAP software. So SAP pays dozens of developers to build a free Oracle alternative.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
It is NOT "a software package;" the "collection of programs" you are alluding to is not called "SAP," but rather R/3 . Recently, they have also been hawking a sort of "distribution" under the name MySAP, but that does not change that "SAP" is the name of the company.
As to the "runs best on Oracle," I don't think one can readily distinguish whether there is actually any technical merit to that or whether it's a marketing ploy that SAP, Oracle, and consultants all agree is in their interests to believe...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Postgres runs under (and comes with) cygwin.
This isn't any ordinary darkness. It's advanced darkness.
FYI, there are many companies running gigabyte and terabyte size databases on postgresql in production.
There's a link to some of them here
600 Megs, how quaint.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
We're not about to require that potential customers install Cygwin to evaluate our software. It has to be a Win32-native version. Besides, the cygwin version of postgresql wasn't very stable last time I checked. (About 6 months ago.)
I call bs on your entire post. either that or you haven't touched Postgresql in well over two years.
Vacuums can be run while the database is in full operation. i know, I've done it.
the folks who test the Linux kernel for scalability under a database are switching FROM SAPdb TO Postgresql because it is faster and provides more load on the kernel than SAPdb.
If your performance degrades over time, you likely don't know how to vacuum, or need to reindex. Reindexing will be a non issue in 7.4, due out this summer.
Postgresql uses MVCC, if you design your database to update the same field over and over, you're going to have issues, because mvcc doesn't perform well when treated like a row locking database.
Postgresql has had hot backups since 7.1 came along, nearly three years ago.
Your comment is more half assed than the one you replied to, because your knowledge is hopelessly out of date, yet you still cling to it.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
FYI, the native Windows port to 7.2.1 was made last year as a kind of "test bed" and the code from that port is being incorporated into 7.4, which goes into code freeze in another few weeks.
After that, windows will be a natively supported platform.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Don't forget interbase. It's a damned fine little dbms as well.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
sold inkp today, @2.90