Re: Oracle buys Innobase

On Saturday 08 October 2005 21:07, Chris Browne wrote:
> uwe@oss4u.com ("Uwe C. Schroeder") writes:
> > Didn't MySQL AB acquire SAPdb (which was Adabas D before)? AFAIK
> > (and you're welcome to correct me since I might very well be wrong)
> > SAPdb supports transactions and foreign keys. If that's the case
> > MySQL AB might be in a position to offer the bells and whistles
> > without InnoDB support if they work out the deficiencies of SAPdb.
>
> They did that indeed, or at least they acquired a license to SAP-DB.
> (I think SAP AG retains license as well; this is akin to the way USL
> sold SysV licenses to many vendors...)
>
> The problems with Max-DB are twofold:
>
>  1.  It isn't at all compatible with the "legacy" MySQL applications.
>
>      It is essentially a database system with a similar "flavour" to
>      Oracle version 7.  That's not much similar to MySQL 3.x or 4.x.
>
>  2.  The code base was pretty old, pretty creaky, and has a *really*
>      heavy learning curve.
>
>      It was pretty famous as being *really* difficult to build; throw
>      together such things as:
>       - It uses a custom set of build tools that were created for a
>         mainframe environment and sorta hacked into Python
>       - Naming conventions for files, variables, and functions combine
>         pseudo-German with an affinity for 8 character names that are
>         anything but mnemonic.  (Think: "Germans developing on MVS.")
>       - I seem to recall there being a Pascal translator to transform
>         some of the code into C++...


WOW - careful now. I'm german - but then, there's a reason why I immigrated to
the US :-)

>
>      Doing substantial revisions to it seems unlikely.  Doing terribly
>      much more than trying to keep it able to compile on a few
>      platforms of interest seems unlikely.
>
> When they announced at OSCON that MySQL 5.0 would have all of the
> features essential to support SAP R/3, that fit the best theories
> available as to why they took on "MaxDB", namely to figure out the
> minimal set of additions needed to get MySQL to be able to host R/3.
>
> If that be the case, then Oracle just took about the minimal action
> necessary to take the wind out of their sails :-).


SAPdb (aka Adabas D) is something I worked with quite a while ago. And you're
right, the naming schemes and restrictions, as well as severe
incompatibilities with the SQL standard where one of my major reasons to drop
that database in favor of Informix (at that time) and PostgreSQL later on.
It was kind of tough to generate explanatory table names with those kind of
limitations. Nonetheless back then (maybe around 1993) Adabas D was a quite
powerful and considerably cheap alternative to anything serious at the market
- and it was easy to sell to customers (back in germany) just because this
was THE database powering SAP R/3.

But you may be right - considering what the codebase of SAPdb must look like
it's probably unlikely MySQL AB can make any considerable improvements in the
time available.

    UC

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