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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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...that MySQL will now simulcast in Spanish?
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!
Does this mean MySQL will now only accept SQL commands in german? That might increase the querytimes significantly....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.