SAP DB – The FREE Enterprise Open Source Database is an open, SQL-based, relational database management system that provides high availability and performance scaling from small to very large implementations.

It supports open standards including SQL, JDBC and ODBC, as well as access from Perl, Python, and PHP. SAP DB claims to be platform independent – that means Linux (Intel),Microsoft Windows,Solaris,HP-UX,Tru64 and AIX – so users can deploy it for a wide array of projects.

The whole SAP DB is still maintained by the SAP labs, even tough it is open-source and license free. MySQL recently went into a partnership with SAP to market SAP DB as a separate open-source – enterprise level – database product…

Some features include

• Stored procedures

• Triggers

• Updateable views

• Subtransactions

• Sequences

• Roles

• Outer joins

• Subselects that can be specified in the FROM clause of a query

• Explicit and implicit locking on row level

• Oracle 7 compatibility mode

• Online Backup

• Online expansion of the database

• Backup tools supported:

  • TSM + adint2

  • Networker

  • Netvault, HiBack

  • Backint for Oracle

    Tools supporting this interface are:

    ARCserve, Backup Express, dbBRZ for R/3, DBVAULT, DoroStore, EASY_BASE, EMC, EPOCH, FDR/UPSTREAM, HIBACK, HSMS-CL Backint, NetBackup, NetVault, NetWorker, Omniback, Seagate Backup, SESAM, Solstice Backup, Sys-Save, TIME NAVIGATOR for R/3, Tivoli

Does that sound impressing… well – I guess a lot of applications, even enterprise type should find this featureset fullfilling their requirements…

Another question is of course about HR-capital and HR-potential on the market to find dudes capable of really being able to handle this database even at 3 AM in the morning (if that is possible anyhow with any database…)

Aynhow – compared to a database like Oracle 9i these features sound sort of funny – but on the other hand: do all new projects really need all those pretty neat and “locking-in” features of Oracle 9i? Or do you only need a stable JDBC compatible database for storage of your few-concurrent-users web application???

Some ex-colleagues used it already on a web-project and were sort of satisfied… maybe I will give it a more in-depth trial… I guess it’s worth to keep track