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List:       openoffice-discuss
Subject:    Re: [discuss] Database for OpenOffice
From:       Frank =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Sch=F6nheit?= <frank.schoenheit () sun ! com>
Date:       2002-03-18 15:29:09
Message-ID: a75145$hke$1 () staroffice-news ! germany ! sun ! com
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Hi,

as Jens already mentioned somewhere in this thread, the main reasons for
not pursuing SAP-DB any further at the moment are resource consumption
and availability on different platforms. At the moment, SAP-DB
(www.sapdb.org) runs on Windows NT and Linux only.

Sure, as SAB-DB is open source, thus it may be possible to remove these
limitations (I think I heard something about SAP-DB light some time ago,
but do not know any concrete plans there). But this sounds like a very
huge project, and given that there are alternatives out there, it sounds
questionable if it's worth it.

As pointed out somewhere else in the thread, it seems better to spend
work on improving integration of other existing databases which do not
have the above limitations (for example have a look at www.mysql.com -
they have a quite impressive list of platforms MySQL is already ported to).

Even more, I think that currently MySQL or PostgreSQL are more wide
spread than SAP-DB is (actually, your questions was the first about
SAP-DB here in the lists, while the two others occur more often), so we
in my opinion the preferences where to spend our resources are quite
clear :)

Finally, shipping Adabas with StarOffice was a decision for the End User
market, just to have an engine for these users included. Offering a
separate driver for Adabas in OpenOffice.org is just an outcome of this:
It does _not_ mean that Adabas is the prefered database for OOo, it's
just that we did not want to throw away the code for the Adabas
integration we had.

The main focus of OpenOffice.org, in my opinion, should still be what
has been mentioned in this thread here, too: Give access to any existing
and relevant database out there. We surely have space for improvements
in this area, and I think we should fill this space first.
Does not meam that including and fully integrating an own database
engine should not be done, too, but on the short and medium run, I think
we reach broader audiences with accessing established databases than
with shipping an own one.

Of course we can try to influence this: If we spend more resources on
integration of for instance MySQL, and then announce the improved
interoperability with each version, this may help spreading MySQL. If
the outcome of this is that MySQL is the de-facto standard to work with
in SO, well, fine :). But we shouldn't try to impose what _we_ think
would be a good (theoretical) standard to our users.


Ciao
Frank

PS: the real best place to discuss such things would be
dev@dba.openoffice.org ....


-- 
Frank Schönheit                 mailto:frank.schoenheit@sun.com
Software Engineer                 http://www.sun.com/staroffice
[Open|Star]Office Base                http://dba.openoffice.org
[Open|Star]Office common UI            http://ui.openoffice.org
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