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Compiere on Postgres/MySQL

Posted by Hemos on from the the-raising-of-awareness dept.

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? "

8 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Makes sense by iantri · · Score: 5, Insightful
    How long until advertisements right in the software?

    Voila. Adware.

  2. Re:Makes sense by Ececheira · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Our solution was sponsoring, in one way or another: support from wealthier individuals or firms, getting advertising and honorable mentions in return.

    The way that you describe is exactly how the fine arts world works. For orchestra concerts, ballets, operas, museum exhibitions and the like, ticket sales *never* cover all of the costs. It's up to wealthy donors to subsidize the work and in return their name goes into a program and sometimes they get buildings named for them.

  3. Re:Pledge Requests in the GUI by base3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In an open source product, the diffs would be out in minutes to remove this crap, thankfully. With closed source, it takes a few days for the crack to appear :).

    --
    One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
  4. Re:Why do you need donations by stienman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Porting the table structure is not the same as, oh, porting the actual program so that it reads and writes to PostgreSQL.

    What exactly do you mean by giving us a database configuration file, and then saying you've ported compiere to postgresql? Where are the modified java files?

    -Adam

  5. Open source? by joshv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But it requires Oracle. Huh. An Open source product that requires the purchase of a proprietary software product. Kinda defeats the purpose. No?

    Personally though I don't understand why application developers use a database for anything other than storage. If all you are doing is simple inserts, selects, updates and deletes it should be very easy, if not trivial to make the application database independent.

    Stored procs, triggers, etc, are evil as they spread your application logic all over the place and there are no standards for how they are implemented by different vendors. It's hard enough to find a relatively standard subset of SQL semantics.

    -josh

    1. Re:Open source? by krumms · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Stored procs etc. are fantastic if you know what platform you're building for (and that target platform has been set in stone).

      I'm building an in-house piece of software in this manner, and stored procs alone saved me LOTS of work - particularly with respect to security checking. All the necessary checking is done automatically when the user logs into the database. Furthermore, users can be assigned roles within the system automatically as a knock-on effect.

      I thought about trying to go database independant for a while, but the sheer amount of time saved for an application with a 95% chance of always running on a particular platform with a particular RDBMS compared to doing it all in the code ... well, it's a no brainer.

      However neat it is, cross-platform isn't always The Way.

      But I completely agree with you with respect to open source projects and db independance. That said, this project hasn't always been open source right? Perhaps that's half an answer as to why they built it the way they did ...

  6. Re:Makes sense by kevinvee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A single patron can start to cause a lot of problems, as we've already seen with all the musicians, artists, and poets that you mentioned. Their (the donors) ideas are the only ones that get seen through, since they control the purse strings. (FuzzyBunnyWare anyone?)

    This was one of the contributing factors to all of the revolutions seen in the 1770s, the death of classicism (with patronage) and the birth of romanticism (with paid-for instead of pledged-for services such as concerts).

    This 'pledged-by-the-masses' idea, however, is a brilliant model for oss, assuming it works as well as necessary.

  7. PostgreSQL is also better for accounting... by einhverfr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    WHile MySQL has other strengths (most notably MySQL is strong where you do not WANT full ACID support, while PostgreSQL is strong where you do).

    Triggers are very important for any business-critical database, as is the requirement that a database raise an exception when it cannot insert EXACTLY what you tell it to into the database.

    For example, if you insert a number into MySQL that is too large for its data type, MySQL will truncate it (NOT good for accounting), while PostgreSQL will terminate the transaction and happily raise an exception! THis behavior is NOT ACID complient.

    MySQL has some other strengths-- it provides a set of generic non-ACID compliant tools (such as HEAP tables) that enterprise databases cannot afford to offer.

    --

    LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP