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Compiere on Postgres/MySQL
Tim Griffin writes " Compiere (arguably the most comprehensive open source ERP/CRM solution) has recently taken an interesting approach to harnessing community support for adding database independence to their product (currently it requires Oracle). They are taking pledged donations to help get the ball
rolling on the project
Certainly there are many feature requests in OSS I'd gladly pledge towards. Is this feature pledging a sustainability model for opensource developers/companies? Other examples, such as
Blender3d which raised 100,000 EUR in 7 weeks, point in that direction. Perhaps in the future we may even see these pledge requests
linked within the GUI itself? "
I have already ported this to postgres on the weekend.
Compiere.pgsql
mike
Introspection is the key to understanding
I didn't know what this was, so from their webpage:
What are ERP Software Solutions? ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and is the software to support your entire business processes. ERP Software Solutions typically consists of modules such as Marketing and Sales, Field Service, Production, Inventory Control, Procurement, Distribution, Human Resources, Finance and Accounting.
What are CRM Software Solutions? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is the software to support your business process to find, get and retain customers. CRM Software Solutions typically consist of modules such as Sales Force Automation, Call Management, Self Service.
In any KDE program, click Help on the menu bar, then select About KDE at the bottom. You will see four tabs, each with Information on how you can help improve KDE.
In fact, you can help right now KDE 3.2 Beta. has just been released. Try it out, report any bugs or problems to help improve KDE, so KDE 3.2 will be a success when its released around Christmas.
PostgreSQL is more feature rich than MySQL. Whether or not it's more "advanced" depends on what you are using it for.
And no, I know MySQL has transactions through InnoDB, however MySQL doesn't have stored procedures, which also means no triggers. PostgreSQL not only has procedures but it has inheritance, overloading, and support for pl/PHP, pl/Perl, pl/Python and a host of other languages you can write stored procedures in.
Theres a bunch of differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL, neither of which make either one better overall. It's a matter of the application of each which determines if one is better.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
It seems logical, but it's not true. Many smaller companies have ERP software, even if it is not always called that way.
:-)
A web-shop can make use of Compiere for inventory management, and a small distributor with a warehouse as well. There's also a general bookkeeping module.
I'm not sure what other modules compiere already has, but what it has is already quite useful for many smaller companies.
And even if it was for big companies? Open source is not so much about software that costs no money, as you are well aware. The world would be a better place if big utility companies had bug-free billing software, for example
- Erwin
Eg. Makumba TagLibrary is DB independent - can work with MySQL, Informix, PostgreSQL, DB/2, Quadcap embedded DB...
Sure, it's quite possible to be DB independent if your usage of the DB is as simplistic as Makumba's appears to be (note: I've just had a quick read of the documentation to get a feel for what it does, I haven't actually used it, as its a JSP thing and I tend to avoid JSP whenever possible...)
There doesn't seem to be any usage in this system of the following features, all of which are horribly unstandardized and can cause sever headaches when moving from DB to DB:
- stored procedures (not supported by MySQL yet, many variations in language used to define them elsewhere)
- foreign key constraints (i.e. ensuring that a column in inserts or updates references a valid row in another table, also not supported by MySQL)
- triggers (hell, I've never used these myself, but folks tell me they can be very handy, and are also not supported by MySQL)
- date arithmetic (OK, I'm lacking in experience, but I find it rather tricky to write SQL queries that can cope correctly with automatically producing date ranges that work in both MySQL and MSSQL, the 2 DB servers I do have more than brief experience with).
I spent some time looking for an opensource CRM and had a look to compiere. Being on Oracle was an issue, but being on java was another issue for my customer.
We are now looking to some more light weight alternatives like http://www.anteil.com/ . It's already based on free/open source databases and written in PHP.
Does anyone know other open sourced "light" CRM. Or a real experience on Anteil ?
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Just yesterday I saw Amadeus by Peter Shaffer (it was a fourth time I've seen this play, one of the best versions I might add) and I can assure you that it didn't work for Mozart at all. Of course we could seek parallels of Antonio Salieri to Bill Gates and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Richard Stallman, but I think we've already gone way too far with that misleading analogy. If we keep comparing Mozart to free software then absolutely no one who knows history would ever want to be involved with free software.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Really? Have you tried setting up postgresql? The version in RH9 was just as easy to set up as mysql, so if that's a PITA, you're not going to believe what you need to do to get oracle to work ;)
Not all projects start from a clean slate. This post explains a bit.
1. Because it hasn't gotten anywhere near the airtime of MySQL/Postgres.
2. Because it is going away -- being merged into MySQL AB's product line as MaxDB.
http://www.sapdb.org/7.4/sapdb_mysql.htm
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I don't know if you have EVER use an enterprise applicaiton before.
:)
No, you don't know. I have. I've worked quite extensively on an ERP application called PeopleSoft. It locates all of it's business logic in the middle tier. The SQL it produces is very database agnostic and will run with minor modification on most database platforms.
Even if it IS just select/inserts/deletes for basic GL/AP/AR applications you are talking about people, systems and components requiring gigs to terrabytes of data and hundreds if not THOUSANDS of concurrent users.
Yes, and basic SQL is more than sufficient to support this.
MySQL can't handle flash back transactions, doesn't support load balancing, hot site, and paralell or clustered transactions. I need all of these to support an enterprise environment!
Who said anything about MySQL, I believe the article was about Postgres. Regardless, or production AP/GL application supports hundreds of concurrent users without any of these features (at least not in the database layer) - so you clearly don't need them to support an enterprise environment.
oh well. You have to remember that big business is alot different than hosting a small website or cddb database on your average linux pc
Thanks for the lesson. I'll have to leave now because I have a production PeopleSoft issue to troubleshoot on our 10 CPU database server.
SapDB is a very powerful system, but if people think Postgres is difficult to setup/maintain...SapDB is 100 times more weenie oriented.
Why SapDB never got the exposure of others is hard to say. Some think it's because of the source code which is apparently very complex, hard to follow with few comments preventing outside people from writing additions/improvements for it. Others say it was simply Sap announcing that it was going OSS and then never doing any other promotion on it. Me, I think it wasn't successful because of the simple fact that the *only* support plan they had available cost $50,000/year. Since their OSS model didn't work they have now joined up with MySQL. They are going to release the next version of SapDB as something like "MaxDB" and it will be MySQL's "high-end" database.
It also means that it will be licensed like MySQL (including client libraries) which will be an issues for a number of people.