Slashdot Mirror
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."
More free shit to play around with. It's great for them, I play around with it, I learn it.
Soon they will have another tech that knows how to operate it. A small business may end up using it so they can ditch the MS SQL stuff and move to a more robust enviroment. They hire a admin, he needs a assistant? I am aviable, and I trained myself enough to be familar with it.
Whoopie.
Then as the company grows, so will it's need. If it's a decent product then they'd definatly pay for it after using it for year or two for free.
Best damn advertising you can hope to get. Got to love it. Sure beats the snot out of ending up being another MS victom and another footnote in history:
"So and so company had a product similar to the insanely popular MS Widget. Although widely considured superior to MS's solution by a large part of the industry, MS's continued dominace of the desktop arena gave the leverage nessicary too".... blab blah blah
Did I mention I also get some free shit to play around with? (given a choice between free and Free, Free usually wins, but we'll see how it goes)
The limited database size of 5 gig makes it worthless to just about every Open Source web site or developer other than the very very small guys who would rather use something like MySQL or PostgreSQL instead.
How exactly is it helpful to release a free version that most people can't use in real world applications? The answer is, it isn't.
Move along people nothing to see here.
The database caps of the free version are high enogh for the product to be usefull for web applications and smaller projects, a market that is completely dominated by free alternatives such as Postgres and MySQL. Almost everyone who shelves out $$$ for a database server run much larger systems.
I bet they are hoping that by giving away the product for free to people who would never buy it anyway, they get droves of people who are experienced at running their system who will eventually buy it for larger projects 'cause that's the system they know how to use.
Kind of like how SUN sells computers to universitys dirt cheap.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
At our company, sybase is our main supplier for database software (ASE mostly). We are slowly changing to MS-SQL, because we're slowly becoming an all M$-shop. (And I'm slowly looking for another job...) .nl. We are now serviced from out of .uk. .NET.
We run Sybase on Alpha/Tru64. We've had our issues during the years, a lot of wich have been resolved by Unix-patches, so I guess Sybase as a DBMS is quite stable.
Support by Sybase however is less cause for optimism, as they recently shut down their presence in
Sybase is, IMHO, rapidly losing their grip on the market. Existing implementations take years to rebuild on a new platform, but it is happening, and I think in a lot of places, and M$ is the main beneficiary.
The way people are using databases is changing. People want multi-tier applications, and the Sybase portfolio can't compete with M$
Sybase should be looking at new markets, and I think this is a good move. The advantage of people being familiar with your product can work wonders, look for example at how WordPerfect got big years back.
no guarantees
too many limitations
Some people actually do pay for their software. And I'm sure the same people will be more than happy to buy this DB if, after trying it out for FREE, find it satisfactory or better.
I can't believe how many whingeing morons I've seen tonight saying "Argh! no source!! ev1l!!" and "aww, only five gigs! stingy bastards, I won't be able to run my eCommerce site on _that!_"
Get real. There's plenty of free databases around that you can use, slashdot uses MySQL doesn't it? Piss off and use that.
You probably wouldn't know a real database from a hole in the ground and continue to be bewildered at why some corps spend $50k + on real databases for years to come.
postgresql officially supports Windows from version 8, then how can Sybase on Linux suddenly claim "a very attractive alternative to Microsoft SQL Server"?
I fact, I've been waiting for free-download Oracle/DB2 "personal database" or some limited opensource release of Oracle/DB2 for a while.
I may be way off-base here, so apologies if I've missed the point, but Oracle have allowed free-downloads for at least a couple of years: Linux version of Oracle 10g.
Not free-as-in-speech, and if you want to deploy it commercially it's not even free-as-in-beer, but it does seem to meet your "personal database" criteria: it's the reason I've more Oracle experience[1] that SQL Server experience (though MSDE briefly threatned to change that - to some extent).
I'd need to check, but a few years back DB2 was also a free download, with the no-commercial-depolyment caveat. I'd be surpirsed if it still isn't; it's a neat trick to get developers hooked on cheap/free versions so that their organisations then migrate.
[1] Twice as much - a whole extra week ;)
This is where the serious fun begins.
does everything that runs on Linux have to come with the source and an oss license???
I bought and paid for Textmaker for Linux and also Opera for Linux, both closed source programs. This Sybase move now means that I can download and play with a serious database. It's a smart move because it means that I will be gaining skills in programming for that database engine, skills which are seriously marketable.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
5 gigs is real pittance for the amount of data being collected these days, almost making this useless. What happens when the 5 gigs fills up ?
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
There are highly capable DBMS available already. From the ubiquitous PostgreSQL and MySQL to the less familiar Firebird, SAPDB, and Ingres, I'd say there's again almost too much choice in the OSS world.
This is a noteworthy announcement from Sybase, but nothing more than Score: 3, Interesting.
All that being said, it would be different if Sybase literally were to open source their product. The reason for this being that while they have diverged since 6.x, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase were once one-and-the-same. The divergence is, I'm willing to bet, still a minority of the codebase. Making Sybase a drop-in replacement for SQL Server in an OSS environment would be killer.
if MS makes the more appropriate solution, you damn better well pick them, for your own server-monkey sake
If you are a server monkey, you aren't picking anything. None of the people I know who have to keep Microsoft shit running ever got to pick it, so it seems that IT in general tends to work even when the decision of what to use is divorced from the execution of actually using and maintaining it. As incredible as it may seem, I've even heard rumors of sysadmins keeping things running after some really stupid choices on the part of CIOs and CTOs.
here's a good point to remember: use the right tool for the job. it's as simple as that.
Nice idea. The reality is: this is what we have, make it work. People have been making it work ever since they pulled out their mainframes and put in PC servers with M$ shit on them. People Chose Microsoft because it was cheaper than mainframes. Microsoft will lose to Linux for the same reason. This idea you are suggesting of the all-important Choice really doesn't much matter. If it was ever about picking the right system, Microsoft would never have replaced mainframes. It has been and will always be about making it work for less money. No amount of marketing, not even astroturfing, will ever change that.
And if MS ever makes a change into the SQL server that breaks some of your programs or discontinues the product, what will you do ? You either port an awful lot of code that you've written to the new version / alternative product, or get stuck with an aging database product which won't have any bugfixes anymore and will cease working with newer operating systems (and processors - was it the AMD or Intel 64-bit processor that can't run 16- and 64-bit code at the same time ?) eventually. And it's even worse if the code is for selling, as opposed to just internal use - then you won't have the option of staying in the older version, and definately have to rewrite at least parts of it.
On the other hand, if you use PostgreSQL, you simply hire someone to maintain the old version and backport any helpfull new features. And if you want to sell your code, you just bundle your own version of PostgreSQL with it.
Having the source code is like an insurance: unneccessary most of the time, but if you don't have it when you need it, you will be sorry.
The article refuses to load, so I can't check to make sure; but this does have all the characteristics of a demo version. Get people used to using a certain product line, and they are more likely to choose it in the future. Also, the size of the installed base directly affects the likelihood of the third party tools supporting this database, which in turn directly affects the likelihood of this database being purchased over the competitors.
Why did you think Sybase decided to release a free version anyway ? Corporations do nothing unless they think they will benefit from it; therefore, they tought they would benefit from releasing this version free. And the most obvious benefit is the one explained above.
So yes, I'd say they will miss him.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Most companies I know barely want to pay enough salaries for the guys to write the code to use the database, now you want to hire an additional guy just to keep the Database software itself up to date? Most companies will just pay the license fee. Much cheaper. That one guy is going to cost, because you need someone very very goood. Someone writing bad code into the database software is a *bad thing*.
I'm one of the heretics that believe that free (as in beer) has helped spread Linux, Apache and MySQL more than free (as in speech), based on nothing more than the fact that the free beer part was what made me start using those products.
But I don't think this announcement will be met by anything but a shrug from most Linux and open source DB users, whetever version of free they believe in. The thought of a product having limitations at all will stop them from even trying it.
It can be relevant for some people, though, and that's for those who're evalutating commercial DB's in the first place and have the budget to buy them.