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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."
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People who just want a full featured database aren't really all that interested in the source.
Where I'm working, we use MS SQL Server an awful lot. And we write an awful lot of code that uses it. We don't spend any time reading source, or trying to find holes / improvements to it. We're too busy.
They're giving you the product for free, but you don't want it because you can't have the source.
I'm sure they'll miss you.
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.
What happenes when Sybase stops maintaining the `Free' version?
When they say it is limited to one proc, do virtuals count (ie, P4 HT?)
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I've never looked at Sybase and have no clue how it works; especially their licensing . .
I'm assuming if I have a true multiproc system, it's only going to utilize one physical proc . .
Anyone have the dirt, I couldn't find a detailed link on the limitations other than the single blurb that was in the original post.
MS, Sybase & Ashton Tate jointly developed the core engine up until the mid nineties at which point there was (I believe) a very acrimonious split due to some licensing argument. That was at version 4.2 and so the SQL syntax remains common between the two. Since then I'm sure there's been a certain amount of divergence (and then some!), but it theory porting should be easyish (famous last words).
I used to be a Sybase DBA and still dable with it a bit. It's a very nice db, and at one time was a real contender against Oracle. It still has a very strong footing in the Financial sector as it was deemed to be faster than Oracle. In todays world of cheap hardware and spare cpu cycles I don't think that's quite as important.
All your (Sy)BASE are belong to us!
I fact, I've been waiting for free-download Oracle/DB2 "personal database" or some limited opensource release of Oracle/DB2 for a while. This release will put much pressure to Oracle, IBM and of course, MS. This is one major strong point of Linux, which pretty much is ignored by the press. With MS solution every small piece of software is at least shareware, and while the cost might be nominal, you still have to go trough the process of buying/registering it. With Linux, you may have to buy some software, but most of the stuff you need can be found around the net, just couple of clicks away from being ready for you to use.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
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.
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.
postgresql officially supports Windows from version 8, then how can Sybase on Linux suddenly claim "a very attractive alternative to Microsoft SQL Server"?
...that microsoft sql server is sybase (albeit 1993 codebase)
This is good. Though people will complain, they always do, about everything.
:)
While I'm a pgsql myself, the more the merrier. As long as there are many differend dbms's we'll all be safe, because homogenicy is the root of all evil.
This will hopefully help Sybase stay in buisness longer thanks to the increased popularity it will give them, which therefor is good for me as a pgsql user.
Simply because improvements caused by competition and the lack of common ground for root exploits.
Now, if only MySQL would just die we would all be better off
If you're expecting to take a recent Microsoft database script and run it on Sybase without any problems you're dreaming.
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.
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.
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Python
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Perl
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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)
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
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.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Will a dual core chip be a Single CPU ?.
Is HyperThreading treated as a dual CPU ?.
And if you treat them differently , they are still a single socket chip, so why the discrimination ?.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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*.
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.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
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.