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SAP Releases Full sapdb Source 80

Posted by Hemos from the making-information dept.
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."
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SAP Releases Full sapdb Source More

SAP Releases Full sapdb Source

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  • don't worry (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you don't have to do a thing if you don't want to.

  • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My business has been using postgresql succesfully for years. It's actually pretty dang good. Especially with 7.x features. It's missing only a few actual database features that Oracle et al. have, and none of them are critical. IE, there are workarounds for missing stuff like having multiple tablespaces in a single 'database.'

  • Re:Um. OpenSource overload... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The only GPL-from-the-start sql server I can think of is GNUSQL, which hasn't really been worked on for the past 3 or 4 years, and was never especially popular.

    So what's your point again?

  • Freebasing is not anti-competitive (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is capitalism at its best!!

  • Re:To be or not to be? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > Anyone actually using this yet?

    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 ... but our programmers are simply not good enought, they're used to embedded SQL. For them it was easy to transform their Oracle and Informix/SE and Informix/ON knowledge onto SAP DB.

    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 /usr/sapdb/{config,wrk}, so you will get problems if you have /usr NFS mounted. Even worse, /usr/sapdb/pgm (where binaries reside) must be writable for a usergroup, a special usergroup, but a usergroup. And a usergroup the database kernel run's under. So, happy hacker, explore the database if you can find a buffer overflow and you're in the game. Lastly, it uses /usr/spool instead of /var/spool, which is quite weird, but solveable with a symlink.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Good point. An old, poorly written, SQL server kicks the shit out of every GPL-from-the-start sql server. That really says something, doens't it?

  • Re:News (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At Feb 26th there were some interfaces released, but not the database kernel, which has only been released now.

  • Re:This is so cool... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sapdb is a fork from another german database vendor's source. Adabase, or something like that..

  • Re:To be or not to be? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28, 2001 @06:40AM (#259870)
    The database doesn't need Java, Perl and Python, it has interface libraries to use the database from these languages. To build the database from the sources, you'll need Perl and Python.

  • This is the new commercial war (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28, 2001 @09:42AM (#259871)
    SAP have a very good reason to have an open source database - every time they sell SAP (small licence $250K to the skys the limit, Nestle have 500K user.) they end up giving 5-10% to Larry Ellison for Oracle run-time. Oracle also sell Apps and compete with SAP. Additionally, they are notorious for giving the apps away, to sell the database. So, now SAP can attack a very nice segment of Oracle's already fast maturing database business. (It's big, the Oracle salesman with the biggest revenue in Germany is the SAP liasion guy...) And, they can claim to be very "a la mode" as they do so. And the community does benefit, after all, it's not them that SAP wants to attack... I think this is already an established tactic - Star office from SUN being an obvious example. Adabas D used to get some blinding benchmarks, and good reviews. If it's still state of the art, then it's worth looking at. As to it being SAP R/3, not at all. SAP has a complete middleware/development/runtime environment that is independent of the database, except for ANSI-SQL calls. That's what they build the applications in. It just uses the database for storage, not for application logic or transaction monitoring.
  • This is an interesting thread; I'd like to see it carried further.
    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)

    by emil ( 695 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @04:17PM (#259873)

    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.

  • Do they expect the Open Source community to clean up their old code?

    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...

  • Last I looked, there was no terribly good pascal compiler for Linux. How are we going to compile this thing in the long term? Am I out of date?

    And how many people of my generation are out there who still know pascal?

    --

  • Why do you say it is far better than PostgreSQL? Please add additional information.

    Also, getting the source is not the same as open-source. Oracle has also shipped all the source for their database applications for years.
  • I don't think I would consider using sapdb until there was evidence that someone out there was maintaining it. SAP need to put up a proper website explaining how their DBMS compares to Postgres, Oracle, DB2 and so on, giving instructions on how to use it, and details of the development team. Otherwise it looks like just a collection of cobwebby old code (mixed Pascal and C? Yuck!) which they GPLed because there was no good reason not to.
  • I've just poked around on SAP's site and seen that they _do_ have a reasonable amount about sapdb. Sorry, I should have checked that before posting.

    Still, an independent comparison of sapdb with Postgres and Oracle would be very handy.
  • See this page for links to order the above CDs.

    http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/linux/ev al _over.htm

    Seems to be free delivery anywhere in the world.

  • They probably needed to do this because of the complexity of SAP and their need to be able to improve the system with relative ease. They are also probably hoping for the Trojan horse effect of getting more people using SAP and thus their consulting services.

    Let's just hope they aren't using this as a means to lay off staff.

  • One reason SAP customers use Oracle instead of the SAP database is that Oracle is a defacto industry standard. There are lots of Oracle developers and Oracle applications. Using Oracle allows them to use a single, widely understood RDBMS for all their data management needs.

    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
  • There is (as with all things) lots of ways to look at this.

    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.
  • I think you missed the main point of my post. Anybody gurus who care to hack on an RDBMS are probably working on postgresql and aren't going to start from scratch on sap. So Sapdb's future is tied to whatever work sap is willing to pay for.
  • Hang on a minute, what are all these supposed
    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.
  • Flaimbait... geez. This probably the single most insightful comment under the article.

    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
    • If the product takes off, SAP could start offering commercial support (a la Red Hat & IBM for Linux).

    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)

    by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <slashdot @ p u r e f i c t ion.net> on Saturday April 28, 2001 @07:02AM (#259888) Homepage
    SAP DB is a code fork of Software AG's ADABAS-D product.

    According to the official SAP DB FAQ [sap.com]:

    • SAP DB is different from ADABAS. In July 1997 and May 1999, SAP made agreements with Software AG for the right to sell the SAP version of the ADABAS D database, which is different from ADABAS, Software AG's established mainframe DBMS. As part of these agreements, SAP renamed its version of the software SAP DB. SAP DB has been enhanced and improved independently of ADABAS for several years.

    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:

    • On the contrary, SAP will continue to develop and support SAP DB to drive future enhancements in cooperation with the open-source community. Leveraging database technology is important for delivering comprehensive and innovative SAP components. Basis development in Berlin contributes to the supply chain management/liveCache, knowledge management/Info DB, and SAP DB for SAP solutions among other tasks.

    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)

    by homebru ( 57152 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @05:48AM (#259889)
    Looks like a good thing. Another company getting into the open-ness.

    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?

  • MySQL and Oracle in the same sentence? I don't think you understand the issues, frankly.

    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)

    by dhogaza ( 64507 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @09:44AM (#259891) Homepage
    Uhhh...Chris, as you know I'm a Postgres user as well.

    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)

    by JordanH ( 75307 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @06:04AM (#259892) Homepage Journal
    They are doing this to snipe at Oracle. The number one database for SAP systems (I believe, used to be anyway...) is Oracle and Oracle competes with SAP with their own App suite.

    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.



    ---

  • NO, more like win 3.0, or MS DOS.
  • I posted this story on Slashdot last October:

    SAP DB database GPLed [slashdot.org] (no, it's not a goat sex link...)

    Didn't generate much interest at that time though.

    -Martin

  • Well anyways after looking at it, has anyone used it to claim its better than MySQL, etc, etc

    Hahahahahahahaha! Man, I needed that. :-)

  • by switching their recommended implementation to IBM's DB2.

    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.

  • Who says it's poorly written?
  • groan. Did you even read the post you were replying to? He said he needed performance over features, and you replied by praising sapdb's features...

    I don't have any data, but I'd wager that mySQL easily outperforms sapdb simply because it doesn't bother with transactions.

  • SAP recently (CBit 2000 & 2001) released a couple of CDs containing free (90 day freely-renewable license) version of SAP R/3 on Linux, and their new Web Application Server, also on Linux.

    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).

  • 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)

    by BinxBolling ( 121740 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @06:53AM (#259901)
    After a quick check of the site I've come to believe that the product that they're OSSing is the same thing that they use in their SAP R/3 product (thats right, the same product that costs thousands of dollars and is used all over the world).

    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.

  • And yet every time I read a story about a company discontinuting a piece of software, everybody says 'oh, then they should open source it, so we can continue to get benefit from it.'
  • I don't remember hearing anything about this. What gives?

    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...

  • And what may this pre processor that they speak of may be? Perhaps and this is a long shot that it might do something with those pascal files? And yes of course I am being a troll no question about it.

  • Monumental Event (Score:3)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @06:37AM (#259905)
    Wow, I have been trying to convince the goons at work for the last couple of weeks that we do not need MS SQL server and the expensive licenses that go with it. The problem is that when I mention the word postgres or mysql they cringe because it is words they never heard before. Now when I go in monday and I say the word SAP jaws are going to drop. The question then will become how fast can we convert. Pascal now that is just a plus since we are a delphi shop an strong supporters of the pascal language.
  • Although I'm sure sapdb is the most complete GPL RDBMS system, it will be very interesting to see how well it performs in comparisson to such database systems as mySQL and Postgress.

    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?
  • I wonder what market share it has compared to the other players in the market? I am not in this end of the business and so they are not familiar to me.

    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)

    by Cmdr. Marille ( 189584 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @05:40AM (#259908)
    This aren't exactly news, the sources were released on February 26th.
    More info can be found at www.sapdb.org [sapdb.org]
  • I got a hint on what SAP wanted to do several months ago (they made an extensive release plan for open-sourcing the stuff) and I like it since the first day I heard of it. The best of all, often forgotten, is that they DID USE the GPL, and not try to invent their own type of free software license, which usually creates only troubles ... The software itself is really usable (instead of it was with that Mozilla stuff) and has almost anything that you will need ... jdbc, perl, python, php, a fat windows client and a web admin, pl/sql support ... and despite the fact they are selling support - they have a very good mailing list - answers are given usually very quickly and directly by the development staff ... shortly speakin' --- its great stuff, and actively maintained. NB: As I heard some time ago, ADABAS (the thing SAPDB came from) was originally a research project before it went commercial at Software AG. Anyone know more of this is true?
  • Personally I wouldn't... PL/SQL is a "Programming Language", not a data access language like SQL is. If I want a programming language (ie: something I'm going to do real application development in) I'm going to use something with more features, and with a better lexical structure. For me, that means Java; C/C++ and VB are also contenders. PL/SQL just doesn't offer me anything.

  • This is so cool... (Score:3)

    by CraigoFL ( 201165 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMkanook.net> on Saturday April 28, 2001 @05:40AM (#259911)
    After a quick check of the site I've come to believe that the product that they're OSSing is the same thing that they use in their SAP R/3 product (thats right, the same product that costs thousands of dollars and is used all over the world).

    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)

    by CraigoFL ( 201165 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMkanook.net> on Saturday April 28, 2001 @08:47PM (#259912)
    In short . . . SAPDB kicks ass feature wise on all the other Open Source stuff we have played with.

    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)

    by CraigoFL ( 201165 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMkanook.net> on Sunday April 29, 2001 @06:33AM (#259913)
    Yeah, that's pretty much what I expected... SAP DB is a decent database but not world class. I know that SAP DB isn't going to take any market share from Oracle or DB2, but I was wondering if it might not be a bad choice for smaller projects (mid-level web sites, some online commerce, etc)

    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)

    by CraigoFL ( 201165 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMkanook.net> on Saturday April 28, 2001 @06:07AM (#259914)
    I've realized what a win-win situation this is for SAP.

    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?

  • 5-6000 saps, is roughly equivalent to something like a HP UX/9000 box with 4 CPUs and 6 gigs of memory... The only ones who knows for sure is SAP, since they set the standard. In terms of transactions per sec, I only have measurements for internal SAP transaction (Sales transactions), this would equate to many thousand pr. second. In terms of DB usuage, I'd say like 3-5000 lookups pr. sec or in that neighborhood. Good for about 2-300 simultaneous users.

  • Yes.... But... (Score:4)

    by twisteddk ( 201366 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @03:32PM (#259916)
    I work with SAP R/3, and have seen the sapdb in action. It's actually just an old DB system they bought from somewhere (I think informix or some such, but I can't remember the company right now). All they did was rename it.

    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)

    by esconsult1 ( 203878 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @05:57AM (#259917) Homepage Journal
    How fast is this thing?
    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.


  • Hey, maybe this could be used by the MySQL team to incorporate high-end functionality into their db.

    I don't think it will spread like wildfire on cheap ISPs though.
  • Worse, I suppose by this yardstick, would be Microsoft open-sourcing their entire product line and tying up the entire open source community, so no other projects see the light of day, again.

    Now, would that be good or bad?

    --

  • Interesting, but I'm wondering why. Do they expect the Open Source community to clean up their old code?

    --

  • I've seen this boat before (Score:3)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @06:10AM (#259921) Homepage Journal
    Two places I've worked have looked into changing the db backend, yet preserving the current environment and considerable codebase. Usually this involved yet-another party to provide the interface. There were, of course, some good reasons.

    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.

    --

  • Several skeptical comments have been made here that SAP is just trying to get the OSS community to clean up it's old code, or perhaps they have elected to dump their DB product and run their framework on 3rd party databases, an this is just a PR stunt to gain favor in the OSS community (or with those less skeptical anyway).

    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 /. and other places to try to head off the backlash by the OSS comunity, to code dumping, and thus optimizing the PR benefit and tax status of getting rid of old application code.

    --CTH

    ---

  • Re:I wonder how well it compares with the competit (Score:5)

    by Deffexor ( 230167 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @10:58AM (#259923)
    As a technical consultant for SAP America, I can say with certainty that SAP DB (previously known as Adabas), is far better than mySQL and Postgres SQL. It has had full transaction processing for many years and is quite comparable in performance to the other big ones like MS-SQL Server and Oracle 8. Although I don't think it is quite as good as them, it's definitely in the same league. (I'll see if I can dig up some benchmarks...)

    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.
  • What type of cumulative effect on product and company does releasing code under the GPL present? Let's hope we take stuff like this and run with it else we may discourage other businesses from following suit.

  • 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)

    by deran9ed ( 300694 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @05:54AM (#259926) Homepage
    SAP DB will become Open Source. It is the first object of the SAP portfolio to go that direction. SAP DB can be used free of charge in non SAP environments

    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?

  • well I would like to see how their "old" code handles locking mechanisms
  • Good, as long as they release the 2000 + line only.
    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)

    by Alamaz ( 310073 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @08:38AM (#259929)
    I run the enterprise application and database support grop at a large canadian University. We have a considerable investment in Oracle RDBMS and some of our DBA's and App developers have been working w/ oracle for >10yrs.
    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 ,4GL, dbcentric development environment. I am trying to get some University resources to remedy this situation though.

  • Sap don't onward license RDBMS licenses - in fact they rat on you to the RDBMS supplier, telling them how many SAP user licenses you bought!

    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....
  • Here's the timeline [sap.com]

    The development toolkit was released in February. What they're releasing now is the database kernel.

  • Re:This is so cool... (Score:3)

    by deaddrunk ( 443038 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @08:38AM (#259932)
    That would be Adabas [adabas.com].

  • Ahh the enterprise... (Score:3)

    by miklernout ( 444473 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @05:33AM (#259933) Homepage
    This is one of the first steps in integrating the GPL thinking in the "old" enterprises. Although I don't like the software they make, thank you SAP...
  • Actually no, I haven't heard of Kylix, but I'll take your word that it's a good Pascal compiler. I haven't done Pascal since the good old days of Turbo Pascal - once I found C, then C++, I gave up Pascal. Other than a dedicated cadre of Delphi programmers (if you want to count Delphi as a sort of Objective Pascal), I've seen very few developers use Pascal recently - if you look for example at the various open source projects, the large majority of them are C/C++.
  • A first look at the source code of SapDB appears to show that it's all C/C++. In fact, at: http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/sapdb/deve lop/framesets/sap_db_development.htm they indicate Perl 5.005, Python 1.5.2, and Visual C++ 6.0 are all that are required to build the database. When you think about it, this makes sense, who makes a good Pascal compiler these days?
  • Most often, Oracle is used as the DB in SAP installs.

  • Re:There's no Pascal that I can see in SapDB (Score:3)

    by DanielDittmar ( 447579 ) on Saturday April 28, 2001 @03:16PM (#259937)
    The Pascal sources are translated to C and then compiled using the local C compiler. That's (among other things) why you'll need to install the development tools.

    File with names like [vg][a-z][a-z][0-9]+ are Pascal sources.

  • A few facts (Score:3)

    by DanielDittmar ( 447579 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @02:38AM (#259938)
    R/3 was originally developed for Oracle only, which accounts for them having the vast majority of installations. No, it's not Oracle and DB2, it's Oracle and a bunch of wannabes (OK, I'm exaggerating).

    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.

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