Hi Reggie, First off, I'm just another SAPDB / MAXDB user (customer). I have never been involved with the SAPDB team or done any hacking on the product. I suspect you knew this, but wanted to be clear.
The $5000 offer I made a couple months ago (2003-08-08) as I was hoping someone out there could port the JDBC driver in short time period (6 to 10 weeks). Honestly, I figured someone would show interest, but so far - you are the only one! The situation is that I have a consulting client who was having such instability with ASP.NET and SAPDB's odbc driver that we had to find a solution. It was apparent that after 18 months that no one was going to make a modern driver for Win32... and even the recent MySQL crossover hasn't hinted at this. I had a client who was faced with replacing SAPDB with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or IBM DB2. We started on ASP (VBScript) and ODBC which was stable, but after moving to ASP.NET the driver proved unstable. We already did prototype testing with SQL Server 2000 and our performance / stability problems disappeared. I am convinced our issue is with the SAPDB ODBC driver, as we have done tricks with it (such as creating our own wrapper) that work around the issue - but at even further performance cost. If you have already done work with data providers for mySQL, I obviously don't need to explain to you the advantage of managed vs. ODBC! For an application that does a lot of frequent small queries (like a ASP.NET web application) the driver stability and efficency can be a huge factor. The US$5,000 was an attempt to come up with an alternative (to ditching SAPDB) before the busy Christmas e-commerce period. Where were you two months ago :) ? To answer your other questions... Personally I think a client library should be wide open (BSD license? multiple licenses?). I haven't kept up on the debate in this area, I know a some SAPDB users were unhappy with the changes that MySQL --> MaxDB introduced on the license front. What license are you using with my mySQL driver? I don't consider 7.3 compatibility to be important. To me it should focus on 7.4 (and later) series. I don't think there is much of a installed base of SAPDB / MaxDB + dotNet to worry about (seems like I have only run into 5 or 6 other users who are "active" with this combination, despite being on this list for over 2 years). Out of curiosity, how quickly do you think you could create a stable MaxDB driver? Something that could be done in weeks, months? Fully Unicode compliant? Getting the protocol down is not going to be easy... I hate to conclude with this, but I think the US$5000 offer may have expired. The circumstances (having to migrate to DB2 / SQL Server) have since passed (client has already made purchase). However, your interest is something I will discuss with my client. Again, how quickly do you think one can be put together? Recap answers: 1. I don't think so. I think we are running out of time for the circustances that lead to that offer. The fact that we didn't get any reply in the first few weeks lead us to re-enforce our conclusion that SAPDB + dotNet was a dead-end (at least for the next 12 months). However, I personally would rather stay with SAPDB - but running out of time. 2. My intention with the offer was to get a stable driver we could use but that it be available to all for free. I don't know of SAP / mySQL would have interest in putting it in the source tree.. but I didn't want it to be restricted. Personally I would prefer total freedom, BSD style license, but I have no plans to distribute it myself so GPL / library GPL is fine. 3. I can't answer what mySQL intends to do with the protocol of the MaxDB kernel. The most modern interface in 7.4 is what I suggest targeting. 4. I think the driver should support 7.4 and later versions of SAPDB / MaxDB. I see no reason to keep 7.3 or earlier compatibility... I just haven't seen activity from Microsoft users on that front. Personally, I would also say that DotNet 1.1 for same reason (no need for dotNet framework 1.0 compatibility). 5. I have no idea of the protocol SAPDB uses. I studied it enough (looking at the JDBC driver source code) to realize it is a difficult task. Hope this answers your questions. Seriously, have you already started on it? :) Stephen -----Original Message----- From: Reggie Burnett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 4:37 PM To: 'Stephen Gutknecht (SAPDB)'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: .NET data provider Hi Stephen I am currently working on a .NET data provider for SapDB. I am the author of the ByteFX data provider for MySql (http://www.bytefx.com). I also have one ( at a lower level of functionality ) for PostgreSQL. I spoke at the last MySql Developers conference on using MySql with .NET and hope to be invited to do the same at next year's event. My questions related to this provider are: 1. Is the $5000 incentive still available? 2. If so, how would I claim it and what would licensing and ownership of the code look like in that case? 3. What does support look like for SAPdb 7.4 and earlier in light of the relationship with MySql? What I really want to know is will the wire protocol for communicating with Sapdb change as a result of work with MySql? I don't want to invest a good deal of time implementing a protocol that is getting thrown away. 4. What versions of the database would you want the provider to support? Would 7.3 and earlier suffice? 5. What docs are available to understand the protocol? If the the db running on Linux and have vtrace working. Also, I have the following url: http://sapdb.2scale.net/moin.cgi/NetworkProtocol I have looked at the sources a bit but could not really make good progress understanding the flow. I have been making ok progress with the protocol specs. Reggie > -----Original Message----- > From: Stephen Gutknecht (SAPDB) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 12:49 PM > To: Reggie Burnett; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: .NET data provider > > Hi Reggie, > > We have been posting about this subject for 18 months and so far no one > has > stepped forward. I even offered a $5,000 incentive for a native C# > driver, > but no takers. This was posted in August 2003. > > Stephen Gutknecht > > > Keywords: dotnet, Microsoft, odbc, driver, jdbc, c#, vb.net, win32, > database > provider, dotGnu, mono. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Reggie Burnett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 8:05 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: .NET data provider > > > I want to know if anyone is currently working on a .NET data provider for > SapDB or MaxDB. > > > > Thanks > > Reggie -- MaxDB Discussion Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/maxdb To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
