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Sybase Releases Free Enterprise Database on Linux
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Sep 09, 2004 04:32 AM
from the everyone's-favorite-price dept.
from the everyone's-favorite-price dept.
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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Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it sufficiently better than PostgreSQL to be attractive - Is it better at all?
Can someone with experience in both platforms comment?
Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
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*.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Would it not be more cost effective to hire someone to convert the data to a new format? Getting relational data between different databases is mostly trival. Code changes not so much, but if the codebase accessing the database was written in house my guess is that it's much quicker to change that known code to adapt to the nuances of the new database than to port over unfamiliar database guts.
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Dual core chips ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is HyperThreading treated as a dual CPU ?.
And if you treat them differently , they are still a single socket chip, so why the discrimination ?.
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Re:Dual core chips ? (Score:5, Informative)
Michael
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Informative)
For a robust RDBMS that is safeguarding key corporate data, that's a pittance. If you don't need the level of robustness that most commercial RDBMS products provide then you don't need a commercial RDBMS of any sort.
Either your data is worth paying for your RDBMS, or you don't need to bother with payware to begin with.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [asp.net], 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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [technewsworld.com] 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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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For the record, Oracle's Speech and Beer (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle's Free (as in speech) software [oracle.com]
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're expecting to take a recent Microsoft database script and run it on Sybase without any problems you're dreaming.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are highly capable DBMS available already. From the ubiquitous PostgreSQL [postgresql.org] and MySQL [mysql.org] to the less familiar Firebird [sourceforge.net], SAPDB [mysql.com], and Ingres [ca.com], I'd say there's again almost too much choice [columbia.edu] 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.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
While at it, the people who will be interested in it will be the people who want to get into that sector and need a toy to play. The demand for sybase skills outstrips supply around 10 to 1. Sybase is releasing it for only one reason - so that PHBs do not start considering alternative databases because of lack of staff.
Otherwise at least for me it is in the "not interesting" category until it gets a decent working DBI module compatible with the most recent version.
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Re:Sybase skills seriously marketable (Score:4, Interesting)
My point, or at least one of them, was that if you are looking at learning a new DBMS, and your selection critera includes marketability of the skill set, Sybase is a poor choice compared to Oracle and DB2.
Microsoft SQL Server is the DBMS leader on Windows platform. If that's your target platform, learn it. Oracle is the leader on Unix platforms. DB2 is Oracle's strongest challenger in this area. If you're looking at commercial DBMS on Linux, I think DB2 is the skillset to acquire. And, they make it relatively easy because you can download DB2 UDB for no charge. Sybase is respectable, but from a career perspective, marketability favors, imho, in this order: Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase.
All, as I said imHo.
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Re:Better than PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all personal and professional preference, of course. But for me... the answer is "no - but it helps."
I'm no Free Software purist. I run Linux systems at home and work (right next to Windows and Solaris systems). I've bought proprietary Linux software for both home and work (mostly games and enterprise apps). But when making a choice, I tend to weight heavily on the side of FOSS. Why? Freedom.
I've been bit plenty of times in the past by intentionaly induced limitations, technical incompatabilities, and agressive licensing. Some vendors are better than others. But with proprietary software, the more one becomes dependant on the product, the more risk one runs of being unable to migrate from it.
Granted - there are no guarentees in IT. But an infrastructure designed on Open Source systems tends to allow a greater degree of freedom. Data formats are documented (if not in documentation itself, in the code - which makes migration possible if not easy). Functionality tends to be limited by technical issues rather than marketing. And if the primary developers of a particular project take a turn that conflicts with your environment, there is a good chance that there are others with the same view - migration utilities are developed or oft-maligned fork keeps the project in a favored direction.
That doesn't make FOSS the magic bullet. There are certainly times where particular examples of proprietary software offer advantages that makes it attractive. And that's where this line of questioning comes in. Sybase's offering lacks the freedom that other FOSS databases offer. So what advantages does it have that would make it attractive?
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Ah, more free shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:Ah, more free shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Limited size makes it worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Limited size makes it worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, you're right. They should, like, ship it with no database size limit!. They everybody could use it, Slashdot, large enterprises, even banks!
And nobody would have to buy it! How selfish of them to give away a database that wouldn't cut it in a large enterprise.
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Re:Limited size makes it worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like everyone here works at (or runs) huge company which works with terrabytes of data. I think it's crap, and reality is that small shop (4 people company, for example, as in my case) can have all their sales/product/tracking/etc. data in less than 100MB (MySQL). At least I do.
I used Sybase (for some ebussines stuff) some 4 years ago, and I quite liked it, but never needed it for myself (expensive
Small businesses are the target for this offer, not uber-geeks who have way too much time on their hands, and want source for everything (although they'll, most likely, never look at it).
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Re:Limited size makes it worthless (Score:4, Insightful)
BTW: what is an "OSS type site" ?
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When they had enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
How do they count processors? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
For those wondering why Transact SQL is so similar (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Someone set us up the BLOB (Score:4, Funny)
Similar move from Oracle/IBM will follow very soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Similar move from Oracle/IBM will follow very s (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [oracle.com].
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 ;)
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Re:Similar move from Oracle/IBM will follow very s (Score:4, Informative)
As for Open-sourcing the DB engine, you can keep dreaming though..
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Only internal business use (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only internal business use (Score:5, Informative)
This same sort of restriction is fairly common in the "enterprise software" space. All it really means is that you can't bundle the free version invisibly into your application (which is OK), and you can't resell "used software" (which kinda sucks).
This means that your customers have to get their own (free) copy from the primary vendor. Oracle, Sybase, MS, etc., all do this, because they want to have a direct relationship with all of their customers so that they can support them.
The "no reselling" part of the deal is a bummer, though. For example, I worked at a startup that bought a $180K Oracle license, and when the company went the way of most startups (sigh), this provision meant that the Oracle license couldn't be sold to get back some money for the investors. Of course, vendors never approve reselling the license, because they'd rather sell a new license to the buyer.
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Clever (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Linux only? (Score:5, Insightful)
microsoft would likely prefer you forget... (Score:5, Informative)
This is good stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Curious about what thing.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this important? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Smart move (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Smart move (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Too risky... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 $50k + on real databases for years to come.
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Re:Front End...? (Score:4, Informative)
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Python [object-craft.com.au]
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Perl [cpan.org]
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JDBC [sybase.com]
Plus, without ever using Sybase (I'm more of a PostgreSQL fan), I'm fairly sure that Sybase would provide a C/C++ api.(For those that haven't caught on, Sybase is a competitor to such products as Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL etc, and is not compareable to silly little toys such as MS Access)
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Re:BRAINWASHED (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are a server monkey, you aren't picking anything. None of the people I know who have to keep Microsoft shit running ever got to pick it, so it seems that IT in general tends to work even when the decision of what to use is divorced from the execution of actually using and maintaining it. As incredible as it may seem, I've even heard rumors of sysadmins keeping things running after some really stupid choices on the part of CIOs and CTOs.
here's a good point to remember: use the right tool for the job. it's as simple as that.
Nice idea. The reality is: this is what we have, make it work. People have been making it work ever since they pulled out their mainframes and put in PC servers with M$ 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.
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Re:My experience (Score:4, Informative)
ASE 12.5 runs just fine on plenty of Linux distros. We run it in production on Red Hat 7.2. It will NOT give "Infected with 11" errors simply because you're on a different (non-supported) distro; it gives you those errors if libraries are missing/not the right version.
Are you on drugs? Not only are most of MySQL's datatypes against the SQL standard, but ASE supports:
int (-2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647), inclusive.
smallint (-32,768 and 32,767), inclusive.
tinyint (0 and 255), inclusive
Transact-SQL provides the smallint, int, numeric, and decimal SQL92 exact numeric datatypes. The tinyint type is a Transact-SQL extension.
Blame MySQL and PostgreSQL for not correctly implementing the ANSI SQL STANDARD SPECIFICATION for escaping characters. This is the same as if you wanted to migrate to Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, or any other product that correctly interprets this ANS SQL standard feature.
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