Sybase Releases Free Enterprise Database on Linux

Tassach writes "Sybase announced today that they are releasing a free (as in beer) version of their flagship database for Linux. The free version is limited to 1 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 5GB of data, which is more than adequate for all but the most demanding applications. This release provides a very attractive alternative to Microsoft SQL Server, and gives developers and DBAs an extremely powerful argument to use against the adoption of Microsoft-based solutions. For those who are unfamiliar with the product, Microsoft's version of Transact-SQL is nearly identical to Sybases's. This high degree of similarity makes porting applications between the two platforms very easy. Sybase is supported by numerous open-source projects, including sqsh (SQL shell), FreeTDS, and SybPerl."

Comments

Only internal business use

[natslovR]

It can only be used internally, so you can't use it in situations where you may have been able to get away with the hardware restrictions on a small external site or (i guess) distributed to clients as part of your product.

1. USE OF PROGRAMS. You may install and use the Programs solely for your internal business purposes by your employees, agents and contractors. The Programs may not be transferred, distributed, sold, assigned, sublicensed or otherwise conveyed (whether by operation of law or otherwise) to another party without Sybase's prior written consent.

Re:Only internal business use

[laird]

"It can only be used internally, so you can't use it in situations where you may have been able to get away with the hardware restrictions on a small external site or (i guess) distributed to clients as part of your product."

This same sort of restriction is fairly common in the "enterprise software" space. All it really means is that you can't bundle the free version invisibly into your application (which is OK), and you can't resell "used software" (which kinda sucks).

This means that your customers have to get their own (free) copy from the primary vendor. Oracle, Sybase, MS, etc., all do this, because they want to have a direct relationship with all of their customers so that they can support them.

The "no reselling" part of the deal is a bummer, though. For example, I worked at a startup that bought a $180K Oracle license, and when the company went the way of most startups (sigh), this provision meant that the Oracle license couldn't be sold to get back some money for the investors. Of course, vendors never approve reselling the license, because they'd rather sell a new license to the buyer.

Re:Smart move

[popeyethesailor]

That company from Redmond, bought the tech from Sybase; the toy database you didnt mention is certainly capable, and is more than adequate for small-medium sites. Unless you meant Access.

And Oracle is already the 'Oracle' of linux, it was among the first enterprise DBs available, and lots of Oracle internal sites already run on RHEL.

This move by Sybase is mostly just a tease- you would probably need to buy a license if you need anything that requires Sybase's capabilities.
Even Oracle will mail you a full devkit, with the enterprise DB+all the goodies. However I cant imagine anyone using this in Production boxes.

Sybase has a nice niche among banks and some large datawarehouse-type environments. It is an order of magnitude easier if you're from an Oracle-Db2 background.

Good news

[the_dubstyler]

This is, IMHO, a very good thing. Sybase is an excellent DB (I've worked with some top developers who swear by it) and a much better option than MsSQL for small projects where 1 proc/5Gb is more than enough (and there are lots of projects like that). Considering that no client I've ever worked with has been willing to go for PostgresSQL/MySQL (preferring MsSQL), this will be a welcome victory against Microsoft, as Sybase has a pretty good name in the db game.

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[azaris]

You are missing the point. It makes it easy to convert from Microsoft SQL. Imagine thousands of independent software developers with an alternative to MSQL within easy reach. Their entire solution cost is now reduced, and they will sell better. At least the ones that take the chance.

I'm not sure so many independent software developers use MS SQL anyway, but there has for a while been a light version of MS SQL, MSDE, available for a free download, with most of the features of MS SQL but with similar restrictions to this Sybase offering.

But this appears to be targeted mostly at Linux developers so it's competition for PostgreSQL and the Abomination That Shall Not Be Named.

microsoft would likely prefer you forget...

[bani]

...that microsoft sql server is sybase (albeit 1993 codebase)

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[blowdart]

Not really. MS SQL used to be Sybase, and thus TSQL used to match. But since 6.5 Microsoft made SQL Server their own, changed the engine to be more ANSI SQL 92 Compliant (ANSI joins in Oracle? Hah), and now as SQL2005 comes over the horizon they've added more compliance with later SQL standards (although nowhere near fully compliant).

If you're expecting to take a recent Microsoft database script and run it on Sybase without any problems you're dreaming.

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[conejoloco]

I have worked with both a few years ago (migration from Postgres 6 to Sybase 11) and sybase performance was outstanding, compared to Postgresql.
I hope postgresql performs better now.

Moreover, this is not the first time Sybase makes this offer : Sybase for Linux 11.0.3 was free to use on Linux, with no limitation.

I personnaly used it for my Web shop, as this database is not only fast and secure, but also quite easy to program with ( especially compared to Oracle ).

The only drawback of Sybase is the lack of standard administration Tools. You have to use a product like (overpriced and windows-only) Emabarcadero DBArtisan.

Re:Front End...?

[m4k3r]

It certainly does!

• Python
• Perl
• JDBC

Plus, without ever using Sybase (I'm more of a PostgreSQL fan), I'm fairly sure that Sybase would provide a C/C++ api.

(For those that haven't caught on, Sybase is a competitor to such products as Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL etc, and is not compareable to silly little toys such as MS Access)

Re:Similar move from Oracle/IBM will follow very s

[popeyethesailor]

You can already download for free, Oracle for Linux,Windows and a few more platforms. All you need is an OTN membership. However its only for Non-production use i.e. you cant run your business off it.

As for Open-sourcing the DB engine, you can keep dreaming though..

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[Gaewyn L Knight]

Ah yes... but what if you are stuck on an application that you don't have access to the codebase? With this "most" ms-sql or Sybase SQLAnywhere applications can simply be told where the new datastore is and work.

We hae several POS and ERP applications on our campus that have been locked into MS-SQL or SQLAnywhere (bleh!). Yesterday after downloading sybase and getting it installed I was able to transfer and fire up test instances of 7 of the 9 applications without ever needing to ask the company that wrote it to make any changes for me.

Would I prefer these apps be FOSS... YES! We are slowly writing new versions as we get time... but it takes time and this gives us a way to save money now.

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[kiwimate]

Right! Here's something else to consider...in the past, when you had an application people might want to evaluate before they committed time and money to buying the full product, what did you do if it required a database and you were concerned your clients may not have an existing database implementation? Exactly...you included the free MSDE engine so people didn't have to go out and spend money on MS SQL or Oracle for what was only an evaluation. If it worked out well and the customer bought the software, they now had a database which, if MSDE wasn't up to snuff for a full production deployment, could be painlessly migrated to MS SQL. The engine is exactly the same, so no translation is necessary.

This worked out so well, precisely because MSDE was free to redistribute and easy to migrate to MS SQL, that MSDE is now included with thousands of applications. And remember -- if you ever outgrow its limitations, it can be directly moved over to MS SQL.

Coincidentally, MS SQL (which, as everyone is ecstatic to be able to point out, used to be Sybase) continues to gain market share. Sybase (see above) does not.

The big three at the moment in terms of market share are Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Oracle is #1 but is slowly losing market share to IBM and MS. Sybase is #4 -- but that #4 translates to 3.6%. And it's static -- they're not gaining any of that market share being lost by Oracle.

Re:Dual core chips ?

[mpeppler]

You can use this version of Sybase on a machine with any number of CPUs. The issue is that you can't configure it to use more than one CPU at a time (i.e. you can only configure one engine).

Michael

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[BigGerman]

>>so people didn't have to go out and spend money on MS SQL or Oracle for what was only an evaluation

Just for the record, Oracle has always been available for free download in complete, unrestricted form. So for evaluation, people would just download and install it. Now, running production on unsupported and therefore unpatched Oracle instance - is the whole other matter.

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[dasmegabyte]

Without problems, you're right. But the changes aren't that great. We do primary development on MS SQL Server (it's easier than Sybase, because Sybase doesn't tell you the syntax of the proc you just wrote is wrong or references non existant fields or tables until you RUN the script. MS has a pre-processor) and I'm the guy who makes sure things run on Sybase. Basically, I do all the compatibility work in a single Textpad Macro. It's actually sort of simple:

1) Strip out the SET statements referencing ANSI_NULLS
2) Convert Niladic function names (e.g. CURRENT_USER -> USER)
3) Add Set DATE_FORMAT mdy, because the default in Sybase is ymd.
4) Find strings unicode strings and strip off the N'
5) Make sure all JOINS have their ON clause directly after themselves...MS lets you nest them, which I think makes for a better looking statement
6) Make sure the retarded VB developer didn't declare all his variables "@foo AS Integer", illegal syntax with illegal datatypes that MS SQL Server would fix for you.
7) Fix the IDENTITY syntax (basically, removing the step and start-at values) on CREATE TABLE
8) Remove ADD CONSTRAINTS that are really defaults or primary keys, and move them to ALTER TABLE ADD DEFAULTs
9) UNION ALL statements don't have column names during parsing in Sybase, so you can't do ORDER BY id_name, you have to do ORDER BY column_number. I think this is cleaner anyway, and it lets you change the name of the column more easily (can be important with ADO.NET, when mapping datasets)
10) Table variables don't work so hot in Sybase. I just create temp tables with hashmark names, same idea with a little less performance.

And I think that's it. Not that bad, really, and the script you end up with is comaptible with both MS SQL Server AND Sybase! I just finished a program that (unlike MS SQL Server) doesn't add crap like this to its scripts, thus making it trivial for us to port our apps back and forth.

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[HancockDC]

A couple points:

1. Oracle and Sybase (and SQL Server and some of the open source databases) have their idiosyncratic way of doing joins but can handle ANSI joins as well. Supposedly if they do business with the Federal Government, they need to be ANSI92-compliant. I have take Sybase and Oracle DBA training (by the respective vendors) and they both concede that neither is fully compliant. (but they are "working on it")
   
   
2. At my last DBA class I was asked why I would do ANSI joins when I could use the method supplied by the vendor. My answer was "code portability". The instructor sniffed and moved on. I won't tell which RDBMS vendor that was, but I doubt either Oracle or Sybase have much interest in encouraging portability.
   
   
3. The last time I checked, Sybase's isql client could connect to a SQL Server backend and do transact-sql. The API is still pretty similar.
   
   
4. Several years ago, Sybase made their ASE 11.0.3.3 server available for free and unrestricted use to users. No support, but you could run it in production mode with no licensing fees. Now it seems they are doing this again. with 12.5.2. Personally, I am thrilled, and wish Oracle and the others would follow suit.
   

To reminisce a bit, I first started using Sybase when they were at version 4.8 and I was starting work with one of the fledgling genome database projects. They practically gave away licenses to such groups (80%) discount. They were known then, as now as a business-oriented RDBMS. They failed to continue in this vein, and the support costs started rising faster than our budgets. The Linux version cost less, and the annual maintenance was far less.

In the meantime Oracle was very agressive in the higher education market, and still is. These two companies have a lot to offer, even if they aren't Open Source.

A reason why a small company might want to go with a free version of a commercial enterprise level RDBMS might be found in the disaster recover features that each has. I am far more familiar with Sybase internals, having taken a course that told me more than I every wanted to know about how it keeps track of data. And I have also recovered data that otherwise might have been lost forever. Oracle's features are just as good, but I have not had the "pleasure" of testing them when the pucker factor is maxed out.

Re:My experience

[MattRog]

It is very sensitive about the OS configuration, only runs well on supported platforms (RH Enterprise, Suse, etc). If it finds anything not conforming its requirements, displays the annoying "Proccess is infected with 11" (meaning Segmentation faults).

ASE 12.5 runs just fine on plenty of Linux distros. We run it in production on Red Hat 7.2. It will NOT give "Infected with 11" errors simply because you're on a different (non-supported) distro; it gives you those errors if libraries are missing/not the right version.

Conversion to Transact-SQL data types from MySQL or Postgres is very tricky, because it doesn't have sub-integer types (smallint, mediumint, etc)

Are you on drugs? Not only are most of MySQL's datatypes against the SQL standard, but ASE supports:
int (-2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647), inclusive.
smallint (-32,768 and 32,767), inclusive.
tinyint (0 and 255), inclusive

Transact-SQL provides the smallint, int, numeric, and decimal SQL92 exact numeric datatypes. The tinyint type is a Transact-SQL extension.

Also, it uses different escape characters: eg. '' (two apostrophes) to represent one apostrophe inside a delimited string.

Blame MySQL and PostgreSQL for not correctly implementing the ANSI SQL STANDARD SPECIFICATION for escaping characters. This is the same as if you wanted to migrate to Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, or any other product that correctly interprets this ANS SQL standard feature.

Re:Dual core chips ?

[mpeppler]

No - of course Sybase is multi-threaded, and has been since day one (long before Oracle used threading).
A multi-threaded app will only run on one CPU at a time, at least in most cases. What "engines" mean here is one or more engines that access the same set of shared memory. You usually configure engines based on the number of CPUs that are available, and each engine is multi-threaded.

Michael

For the record, Oracle's Speech and Beer

[Plugh]

For the record, aside from the free (as in beer) software downloads, Oracle has also released a bunch of GPL'd and OSS software. IMO, Oracle really doesn't get enough "media play" for this among the Slahdot crowd.

Oracle's Free (as in speech) software

If you saw Chuck Rozwat's LinuxWorld keynote (2 years ago, I think) you'll know that Oracle uses Linux PCs for its base development. Not just for "back-office apps", mind you, I mean a gigantic development environment with THOUSANDS of Linux PCs. The resulting inevitable patches to coreutils, etc, are all on the oss.oracle.com site above, as are Oracle's (GPLed) Clustered Filesystem.

Re:Better than PostgreSQL?

[jedidiah]

Oracle SE is $150 per CAL. The minimum is 5 named users. So I did get the price wrong ($750 vs. $500).

For a robust RDBMS that is safeguarding key corporate data, that's a pittance. If you don't need the level of robustness that most commercial RDBMS products provide then you don't need a commercial RDBMS of any sort.

Either your data is worth paying for your RDBMS, or you don't need to bother with payware to begin with.