SAP Releases Full sapdb Source 80
A reader writes: "SAP has released full source of their sapdb sql database system under the GPL.
It can be found at http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/sapdb/deve lop/dev_sources.htm
It's probably the most complete free database system available
right now, with much more features than interbase, mysql or postgresql.
The codebase seems to be rather old and is written in a mix of Pascal
and C. It contains interfaces to Perl and various languages."
don't worry (Score:1)
Re:Corporate Strategy - Incentive to OpenSource (Score:1)
By all accounts SAP has, since the initial announcement months ago, spent a lot of time cleaning up the code.
I see no reason to prejudge them - and I'd much rather wait and see what people more experienced think of the code.
Re:SAPDB vs POSTGRESQL (Score:1)
Right now I can only see one or two minor things that postgresql doesn't have.
Only two? How about: A proven track record in business?
Re:SAPDB vs POSTGRESQL (Score:1)
Re:Um. OpenSource overload... (Score:1)
So what's your point again?
Freebasing is not anti-competitive (Score:1)
Re:To be or not to be? (Score:1)
We're using it already for a LIVE application in the transportation business area.
One reason we select it was it's 24x7 mode. Postgres did not scale well to this because you need to vacuum and (to my best knowledge) during this time database operation is halted.
The other K.O. criteria was embedded SQL. That's an ancient and outdated way to put SQL statements into your C code. Ok, one should write C++. Or Python. And use fancy objects and such
The database is fast enought for our app, it's actually faster than Informix/SE, but that is not an art. However, our table layouts are quite simple and seldom contain lot's of data (packages are arriving and going out all the time, but the warehouse is fixed in size, so it can hold only N package units and so the database is unlikely to grow beyond N datasets).
However, SAP DB sucks in installation --- at least on Linux. It is totally FHS unaware, stores live data in
ODBC does also work, but in SAP DB 7.2.x.y you needed to get a library from sapdb-web to have one that is not crashing. They managed to put three different libsapdbod.so files into their various RPMs
So, generally speaking: you get lot's of things that you don't get normally, but you have to deal with some problems, because this baby has just been born and does not have the track of public review and suggestions behind it that over databases do have.
whos's on first (Score:2)
Customer: What is the command that will tell me the revision code of a program?
UNIX consul: Yes, that's correct.
Customer: No, what is it?
UNIX consul: Yes.
Customer: So, which is the one?
UNIX consul: No. 'which' is used to find the program.
Customer: Stop this. Who are you?
UNIX consul: Use 'who am i' not 'who r yoo'. You can also 'finger yoo' to get information about yoo'.
Customer: All I want to know is what finds the revision code?
UNIX consul: Use 'what'.
Customer: That's what I am trying to find out. Isn't that true?
UNIX consul: No. 'true' gives you 0.
Customer: Which one?
UNIX consul: 'true' gives you 0. 'which programname'
Customer: Let's get back to my problem. What program? How do I find it?
UNIX consul: Type 'find / -name it -print' to find 'it'. Type 'what program' to get the revision code.
Customer: I want to find the revision code.
UNIX consul: You can't 'find revisioncode', you must use 'what program'.
Customer: Which command will do what I need?
UNIX consul: No. 'which command' will find 'command'.
Customer: I think I understand. Let me write that. UNIX consul: You can 'write that' only if 'that' is a user on your system.
Customer: Write what?
UNIX consul: No. 'write that'. 'what program'. Customer: Cut that out!
UNIX consul: Yes. those are valid files for 'cut'. Don't forget the options.
Customer: Do you always do this?
UNIX consul: 'du' will give you disk usage.
Customer: HELP!
UNIX consul: 'help' is only used for Source Code Control System (SCCS).
Customer: You make me angry.
UNIX consul: No, I don't 'make me' angry but I did 'make programname' when I was upset once.
Customer: I don't want to make trouble, so no more.
UNIX consul: No 'more'? 'which' will help you find 'more'. Every system has 'more'.
Customer: Nice help! I'm confused more now!
UNIX consul: Understand that since 'help' is such a small program, it is better not to 'nice help'. and 'more now' is not allowed but 'at now' is. Unless of course 'now' is a file name.
Customer: This is almost as confusing as my PC.
UNIX consul: I didn't know you needed help with 'pc'. Let me get you to the Pascal compiler team.
Re:Um. OpenSource overload... (Score:2)
Re:News (Score:2)
Re:This is so cool... (Score:2)
Re:To be or not to be? (Score:3)
This is the new commercial war (Score:3)
Re:This is so cool... (Score:1)
If, for example, PL/SQL were opened up - or more likely, if there was a PL/SQL clone - and let's
say at that point, porting it to other databases became viable, would you use it? Or do feel it is too "tied in" with simple SQL?
So we are clear on this, DON'T PAY FOR SQL SERVER! (Score:4)
Instead, download Sybase 11.0.3.3 from linux.sybase.com. The server is available for free for production use, unlike Oracle, DB2, or MS.
Sybase and MS SQL server were the same program until release 4.8. When installed properly, a Sybase server will work with MS SQL server 6.5 ODBC drivers.
No, Sybase doesn't have the tremendous TPC benchmarks that Microsoft has achieved, but they soundly beat Oracle for a long time.
If you use Sybase instead of SQL Server, you haven't tied your database to an operating systems vendor. Smart move.
Re:Um. OpenSource overload... (Score:2)
No, their FAQ says that they believe that databases are just part of the infrastructure, and should be free.
Whereas applications (their core business) cost money...
How to work with it? (Score:2)
And how many people of my generation are out there who still know pascal?
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Re:I wonder how well it compares with the competit (Score:1)
Also, getting the source is not the same as open-source. Oracle has also shipped all the source for their database applications for years.
Re:Corporate Strategy - Incentive to OpenSource (Score:1)
Re:Corporate Strategy - Incentive to OpenSource (Score:2)
Still, an independent comparison of sapdb with Postgres and Oracle would be very handy.
Re:Freely downloadable demo version of R/3 availab (Score:2)
http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/linux/e
Seems to be free delivery anywhere in the world.
Re:This is so cool... (Score:2)
They needed to do this (Score:2)
Let's just hope they aren't using this as a means to lay off staff.
Re:OK, but... (Score:2)
If they use the SAP RDBMS they either use Oracle as well, or suffer from the lack of developers and 3rd party applications for SAP RDBMS
Re:Smart move by SAP (Score:2)
We can be skeptical about it and guess at hidden motives that prompted this (such as that given most big SAP customers replace SAPDB with Oracle etc, SAP open sourcing their product may prompt one of the big DB vendors to open their own, leading to the combined price of SAP + Big DB being less without SAP having to do an aweful lot.
Phew, well, maybe, but I doubt it. Chances are some student intern asked it and no one could give a serious answer to why not.
At the end of it all, there is now more code available freely than before and on my scale, that's a Good Thing for us humans and probably the world around us.
If actions speak lowder than words, its often becuase action actually does say something - unlike much of today's corporations output. And if that action is good, then more power to that, we should support it regardless and encourage it more. This way we may end up with everything under Free license in 3 or 4 years.
We can make that happen.
Re:SAPDB vs POSTGRESQL (Score:1)
SAPDB vs POSTGRESQL (Score:2)
features that SAPDB has that Postgresql doesn't?
The postgresql team have made a hell of a lot
of progress over the last couple of years and it
has become very stable and full featured. Even
if by some chance sapdb has more features there is
next to nil chance they are going to attract any
open source developers to compete with postgresql
and if it hasn't already it will fall behind
postgresql sooner or later. Right now I can only see one or two minor things that postgresql doesn't have.
Re:OK, but... (Score:1)
Instead, people are bumping up a bunch of posts that amount to "they're only doing it so we can clean up their code"... yea, right. You obnoxious college brats can't even clean up your own spittle.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Re:Smart move by SAP (Score:2)
Note that SAP is already doing this. SAP DB has always been supported, since it's part of the SAP/3 product line. The difference is that SAP DB is now free.
Some background (Score:5)
According to the official SAP DB FAQ [sap.com]:
Another FAQ entry answers the question of whether SAP is merely dumping the database on the open-source community so somebody else can clean up their old code:
Also, remember that SAP makes money on consulting/support services. So SAP AG would be foolish to release it merely to pass the burden of providing support on to the community.
OK, but... (Score:4)
But the question to me is, if SAP has their own database, why don't SAP customers use that instead of adding complexity by purchasing third-party databases from (among others) Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft? If the SAP SQL database works, why don't they use that? Can't be a matter of cost; surely SAP doesn't charge more for their SQL product than other companies.
At my last client site, we spent two years trying to force SAP to work on a mandated third-party database. We were never told that there was an option to use a SAP database engine.
I ain't trolling. Anybody know for sure? Is this thing viable?
Re:To be or not to be? (Score:2)
MySQL vs. Oracle is a bit like me vs. Michael Jordan on the basketball court.
SAP DB is a full-featured industrial-strength RDBMS system.
Re:SAPDB vs POSTGRESQL (Score:5)
Sap DB has many features and administrative tools still lacking in PostgreSQL.
Try real archiving and replication, for instance. Being able to specify where to allocate tables and indices without using "ln -s". An overwriting storage manager so you don't need to VACUUM nightly (or hourly as some do on very busy systems).
That just scratches the surface.
Yes, PG is vastly improved and I'm a big fan. And much of the above list is scheduled for PG 7.2. But today it's PG 7.1 and PG doesn't have these features.
OpenACS [openacs.org]currently is supporting Oracle and PostgreSQL with our upcoming OpenACS 4.x product. Sap DB is very likely to become the third RDBMS we support with the toolkit.
Re:OK, but... (Score:5)
This makes SAP feel very very uncomfortable.
Releasing a high quality (?don't really know, but that's the impression that SAP would like to make, I'm sure) DB as Open Source attacks Oracle's stated commitment to Open Source - by comparison - and puts something out there to compete with Oracle on the cheap-end, which is becoming more important all the time with the New Economy collapse.
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Re:Corporate Strategy - Incentive to OpenSource (Score:1)
Everything old made new again (Score:1)
SAP DB database GPLed [slashdot.org] (no, it's not a goat sex link...)
Didn't generate much interest at that time though.
-Martin
Re:To be or not to be? (Score:1)
Hahahahahahahaha! Man, I needed that. :-)
Re:OK, but... (Score:1)
This lasted only about as long as a Newborn cow in England lasts nowadays. Their recommended dB layer is actually M$ SQL (running on NT of course), and has been for a while.
Re:Um. OpenSource overload... (Score:1)
Re:I wonder how well it compares with the competit (Score:1)
I don't have any data, but I'd wager that mySQL easily outperforms sapdb simply because it doesn't bother with transactions.
Freely downloadable demo version of R/3 available (Score:4)
Both 'Testdrive' CDs can be obtained either as ISOs from the SAP ftp server here [sap.com] (R/3 BASIS on Linux) and here [sap.com] (WAS on Linux).
Alternatively, for those without big fat pipes can order the CDs from SAP Shop [sap.com]
Both these demos use SAPDB as the underlying repository for storing ABAP programs at their associated data.
There's some documentation supplied with the CDs. In addition there's a wealth of documentation about SAP AGs products at help.sap.com [sap.com].
I have a couple of forums on my website for discussion of these products. Feel free to drop by sapstuff.com [sapstuff.com], and visit the TestDrive CDs Discussion forum [sapstuff.com] or the BASIS Forum [sapstuff.com] (BASIS is the term for the underlying technology which the SAP applications use).
Re:Smart move by SAP (Score:2)
This is probably a smart move by SAP. So what?
It's still a step in the right direction for the OSS community. If the codebase is good, a community for cleaning/improving the source will probably gather. If not, ideas may be extracted and used in other OSS databases, such as postgres or interbase.
Every large project going open source will add to the knowlege base of the open source community, so we should be grateful to them for giving us the code, no matter what their reasons might be.
btw; it's good to see that they've used GPL instead of following the trend of making new GPL-soundalike licenses.
Re:This is so cool... (Score:5)
Thousands of dollars? More like hundreds of thousands, I think.
SAP R/3 has an abstraction layer that allows it to run on top of many different databases, including Oracle and DB/2. It may also run on top of sapdb, but few if any R/3 installations actually do so. During the year I spent working for a consulting company specializing in SAP implementations, I never even heard of sapdb, much less of anyone actually using it on an installation - everyone was using Oracle or DB/2. No doubt this has played a role in their decision to open it up.
So I wouldn't expect sapdb to be a particularly high-quality database - SAP's strength is in business applications, not the databases they run on top of. If you're interested in an open-source database, you should probably stick with one of the ones that already has an established open-source following and developer community.
Re:Corporate Strategy - Incentive to OpenSource (Score:5)
did anyone know this was happening? (Score:1)
although another Open Source Database can't possibly be a bad thing.
And SAP being who they are, well.....
We're getting more legit each day. Sweet...
Pre Processor (Score:1)
Monumental Event (Score:3)
I wonder how well it compares with the competition (Score:2)
I for one, am mostly interested in RDBMS's for web applications - where often performance usually counts more than just functionality and perfect ANSI compliance.
Perhaps its a little too early, but are there any comparisson benchmarks out there yet?
Market Share? (Score:2)
Just trying to find reasonable information is not worth the hassle of navigating a sea of spin doctor positioning papers.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
News (Score:3)
More info can be found at www.sapdb.org [sapdb.org]
A good thing for the free software community (Score:2)
Re:This is so cool... (Score:2)
This is so cool... (Score:3)
Does anyone here have any experience with SAP DB, and can comment on its quality/ scalability/ performance? I'm assuming that they're all reasonably good (at least as good as SQL Server, maybe more along the lines of DB2 and Oracle?)
This could be the big break that OSS DBs were looking for; now there's products for both the low and high end of the RDB market.
Re:This is so cool... (Score:3)
Yeah, I guessed that from viewing their web site, and your post confirms it... SAP DB seems to have all the features down. However, what I personally am most concerned with is it's reliability and scalability. Thusfar, all I've heard on /. is that it's usually swapped out of SAP R3 installations for Oracle or DB2... not all that encouraging. However, even if it's only as good as MS SQL Server than I think it could become a real player in the DB market. After all, it's free...
The problem with SAPDB is the same as with all Opensource DB's. No affordable, robust ,4GL, dbcentric development environment.
I'll step up on my soapbox here for a second... do you really need a 4GL DB-centric development environment for your DBMS? Personally, I prefer to do my development In something totally removed from the database (Java w/JDBC in my case). When I build apps, I want 100% of my business logic to reside within the application layer. Simple SQL scripts should be sufficient to handle most DB maintenance. Please let me know what your opinions are. :-)
Re:Yes.... But... (Score:3)
Unfortunately for me (having never used SAP) 5-6000 SAPS doesn't mean much... I don't suppose you could give a rough estimate about how many transactions per second that would equate to, could you?
I find it interesting that you'd choose other free DBs (MySQL, PostgreSQL being the 2 I know of) over SAP DB. Can you explain this statement further?
Thanks for all your insights.:-)
Smart move by SAP (Score:5)
Everyone, raise your hand if you've purchased a license for SAP DB as a standalone product, without the (still commercial) SAP core product (SAP R/3).
Anyone? I thought not. So OSSing SAP DB isn't costing SAP any (or maybe very little) lost license fees.
Now since the DB is OSS, it has the potential to have a lot of community development work devoted to it. This work is done for free of course.
Theres also some good publicity for SAP (at the very least a post on /.). This could spin off into more sales of SAP R/3. But if it doesn't, then there's really nothing lost.
If the product takes off, SAP could start offering commercial support (a la Red Hat & IBM for Linux).
Best of all, businesses now have the option of using a free enterprise-worthy DBMS (look out SQL Server). How much would you like to bet that SAP starts advertising how well their SAP R/3 product integrates with their own database?
Re:Yes.... But... (Score:1)
Yes.... But... (Score:4)
Reason they did so was actually to be able to compete with the other DB's that's usually distributed with SAP R/3, such as Oracle, DB2 etc. 'coz when You buy a "SAP in a box" set, You get a DB of Your choice, plus SAP version of Your choice for an OS of Your choice. Of course most SAP custumers run on UX systems, and use obscenely expensive DB's like Oracle. But SAP pays for the Oracle License (it's in the box, I think I have like 40). This ofcourse cuts into SAP's profits. So by simply letting people choose a DB that's FREE for SAP to use, they save a SH*TLOAD of cash (consider half a mil. customers worth 5-10K in licensing fees pr. year. Haven't checked the numbers, but I imagine it's in that neighborhood).
As for the use of the DB, I still go for Oracle, and so does our customers. After all, the Oracle DB has better support, a better name, and as an SAP customer You don't pay no matter WHICH DB You choose. So why not go for the best ?
Most do.
And seeing the base in action, I would say it's nice, but needs some major renovation rather than just the current level of patchwork that has been done to it for years on end. Once You scale up to 5-6000 SAPS (measurement for usage in an SAP system), You might aswell get out the hand-cranck, 'coz it just wont do. But for smaller systems with less then 2000 SAPS it runs fine... The smaller the better. It might be able to handle big loads, but not REALLY big loads.
Personally, I wouldn't get caught dead with the sapdb in my systems. But if SAP gives it a big overhaul, maybe it will be able to compete with the big DB's. Unfortunately, knowing SAP's record for ovehauls, they'll probably be fixing it for years on end before it runs even close to smoothly. Anyone who's worked on an SAP system (development) will agree with me on that.
So for now I's go with one of the other free DB's in the market, if I needed a large DB for free. Otherwise I stick to what I know to be working without any problems (read: Oracle, DB2 etc.)
Well, I'd like to know... (Score:3)
What are its limitations?
How scaleable is it?
Has any slashdot reader installed and used this before?
The fact that it is available for my 2 favorite languages (PHP, Perl) in my book makes it a Good Thing (TM), but I guess that until there is some feedback from the community on my above questions, the download rate might be a little low.
Using logic for other databases (Score:1)
I don't think it will spread like wildfire on cheap ISPs though.
Re:This is anti-competitive (Score:1)
Now, would that be good or bad?
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Um. OpenSource overload... (Score:2)
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I've seen this boat before (Score:3)
Our code did what we needed, supported our business
There was considerable investment in getting it there (man years)
Our current db was proprietary or otherwise limited
Our current db had severe downsides, broken files, limited tools to fix, no journaling, unable to backup in production, etc.
I expect SAP addresses some of those and what they gain is people like me who see on thing they want and work so their db code has a layer to other enviroments and some of these features they may not have.
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Corporate Strategy - Incentive to OpenSource (Score:4)
It seems to me that recently, OpenSourcing by large corporations, of old code, or of products neat their end-of-life, has become all too frequent. It has become a currency, and standard business strategy much like 'Corporate Giving' to charities. There are entire business consultancies built around the service of: "Hire us to manage your corporate giving program". These consultancies oparate mych like tax atourneys, coming up with donations to charities that make a company look good in it's chosen market segment; the donations being of a size appropriet to get the tergeted tax writeoff.
This suggests a business opportunity 'Open Sourcing Consultant'. This person could provide the service of developing a strategy for OpenSourcing old application code and making it look all spiffy and new, also developing press releases and planting stories on
--CTH
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Re:I wonder how well it compares with the competit (Score:5)
Nevertheless, SAP DB is a full-blown Relational DB. Many European companies are "live" with their production systems using SAP DB as the backend.
I'm surprised more people haven't started using SAP DB now that it's fully GPL'd. If you need a real DB that can really scale and can't afford to buy Oracle or MS-SQL server, this is the one to get!
Btw, Open Source is not something that's new to SAP. When you buy SAP R/3, you get all the source code to all of the programs that execute on the R/3 system. Many customers heavily modify the code to adapt it to their own business processes. (The core "kernel" code is not open source and probably never will be.)
I think SAP is on the right track. Open Source is really starting to make sense to some companies. Hopefully the rest will realize this, too.
Effects of open source (Score:2)
Re:PL/SQL (Score:1)
We use PL/SQL quite a lot where I work. It's a programming language (which is what the PL stands for) with SQL access built in. Mainly what it's good for is writing code that needs to do something in the database that's more complex than one select, insert, update or delete statement.
What we find it's useful for is (1) keeping audit trails and (2) filtering and summarising raw data for presenting to a user. New data is arriving all the time in our database, so we use triggers (which call PL/SQL procedures) to make sure that the audit and summary tables are always up-to-date.
While I think PL/SQL is very useful, and very good at what it does, I agree that you couldn't write a complete application in it. It gives you full access to everything in the database (subject to access privileges, of course) and almost none to anything outside. For a long time, I was convinced it didn't even have a print statement. (It does, but it's not obvious how to use it.)
As for an open-source equivalent, Python claims to be embeddable in just about anything. Could it be (or has it been) embedded in MySQL and/or Postgres?
To be or not to be? (Score:4)
Hrmm Ok.. Well anyways after looking at it, has anyone used it to claim its better than MySQL, etc, etc., sure the page layout blows MySQL's out the frame, but it damn sure needs a heck of a lot of dependencies (JAVA, PERL, and Python?!) to run it. I wonder how it would hold up (server loads) in comparison to MySQL, or Oracle on diff architects.
Anyone actually using this yet?
Locking mechanisms (Score:1)
Re:This is anti-competitive (Score:1)
I don't *want* to see 9x code, any of it.
Seriously, MS *still* makes money selling win3.11 licenses!
So don't expect anything OS from them for a *long* while.
Re:This is so cool... (Score:5)
We started examining SAPDB for functionality in Feb and what we have found is that the feature set is about the same as Ora 7.3. The management command line interface looks vaguely mainframish (not a problem to my view) but is fairly intuitive and straight forward.An Nt gui management console and sql studio is available as well. Much cleaner than Oracle Enterprise Manager if not as many features.
As far as speed goes. It seems to faster than Oracle but we have no load test as yet. The fact that it is used as the backend to SAPR3 suggests that scalability should not be a problem.
Point in time recovery and mature transaction handling is also a big plus.
In short . . . SAPDB kicks ass feature wise on all the other Open Source stuff we have played with. At the RDBMS level SAPDB competes well with Commercial guys. All db geeks need to take a look . . . you will be impressed. The Pointies will like the "value proposition"
The problem with SAPDB is the same as with all Opensource DB's. No affordable, robust
Re:Yes.... But...[Corrections] (Score:1)
SAPDB == Adabas D (The Unix version of the old mainframe stalwart).
Software AG (who built Adabas) have their dev headquarters only minutes from SAP's in Germany (Darmstadt & Walldorf respectively)
And this is good news to have a decent RDBMS, backed by professional s/w developers who will fix bugs if required....
Re:News (Score:2)
The development toolkit was released in February. What they're releasing now is the database kernel.
Re:This is so cool... (Score:3)
Ahh the enterprise... (Score:3)
Re:There's no Pascal that I can see in SapDB (Score:1)
There's no Pascal that I can see in SapDB (Score:2)
Oracle used more than SAPDB in SAP instances (Score:2)
Re:There's no Pascal that I can see in SapDB (Score:3)
File with names like [vg][a-z][a-z][0-9]+ are Pascal sources.
A few facts (Score:3)
SAP DB is not swapped out for Oracle, the customer buys SAP software with the database of his choice from the start.
Customers pay for the database as a certain percentage of SAP licences (different for each supported database), but it's paid to SAP. So it may appear to technically inclined people that the database is for free.
SAP bought SAP DB (then Adabas D) to be able to offload some processing to a different server without requiring additional database licenses.
SAP bought SAP DB to be able to implement some non relational DB processing without being locked into a specific vendor.
SAP DB has never been actively marketed because SAP didn't want to appear as a competitor to IBM or Microsoft.