relational database?

[Paul Boddie]

"Ruediger Maehl" <ruediger.maehl_nospam at web.de> wrote in message news:<newscache$hzbztg$btb$1 at www-neu.dzsh.de>...
> "Paul Boddie" <paul at boddie.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:23891c90.0204020644.3ea4bc40 at posting.google.com...
> > I'm not sure I would second that recommendation unless SAP DB has
> > changed dramatically over the past few weeks. I found that the
> > installation was quite a bit more complicated than, for example, MySQL
> > (at least on Windows) and upon issuing the arcane commands for
> 
> Yes, you need to get used to the commands. But by now there is a
> database manager (client/server, web) available, which supports
> you in daily routine.

I just found it much more "involved" to get started with in comparison
to MySQL (on Windows) or PostgreSQL, Sybase ASA (on UNIX).

> > restarting database instances, the software would complain that the
> > instances needed restarting, which was hardly very reassuring with
> > respect to either the stability or the usability of the software.
> 
> Sorry, but I don't understand this statement.

Well, there's a combination of commands that one apparently needs to
execute to restart the database server, and this appears necessary
when recreating databases. Unfortunately, the "how to" documentation
isn't particularly clear about this, beyond a terse summary of how it
might be done:

  http://www.sapdb.org/sap_db_howto.htm

Then, there are the obvious questions? What does <DOMAIN_password>
mean when one hasn't been specified in the instructions? It certainly
isn't a Windows domain password, for example, but one is left
wondering.

> > As for the Python DB-API module, I couldn't get any version of it I
> > found to work with the database system. Admittedly, my objective was
> > to get a JDBC connection up and running, which was eventually
> > successful, and I therefore cut that particular side-investigation
> > short.
> 
> I had no problem to use the native interface.

Well, perhaps I was too ambitious in expecting it to work with a
binary installation of Python on Windows. Had I been evaluating it on
UNIX, I would have been more inclined to investigate the exact
problem.

> Compared to SAPDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL are well developed
> over a long time and there are more tools available. IIRC, MySQL has had
> a 2GB limit for the size of a table and was not free and PostgreSQL
> needed some Cygwin thing to run (on W*ndows). That were the reasons
> for me to use SAPDB and it is in production for 14 months now without
> any problems. Anyway, YMMV.

Indeed. Anyway, my main point was that even for people who have
installed and evaluated a fair number of database systems, such as
myself, the documentation for SAP DB is more "opaque" than for many
other systems. For those people who don't tend to install lots of
packages, I would have a hard time recommending SAP DB for that very
reason.

Paul