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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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
right, mysql is going to kick some ass thru this partnership.
Do you have any idea how much a typical SAP implementation costs? I'd bet the median price is $10 million dollars. In an implementation of that size you could probably trim 1% by shifting from DB2 to mysql. Nobody worth their salt would recommend such a rediculous move.
By the time they get SAP running reliably on mysql it will be four years down the road and the product will be completely reengineered.
In the meanwhile, I suppose there's some marketing benefit to being able to say "we'll be good enough to run financials off - some day".
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
My two favorite:
Just in the mood of wasting bandwidth.[Pruneau
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
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)
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.
- 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.