It is more fundamental than our personal stability problems with ODBC driver. OLEDB has been the newer standard for Windows drivers for many years and SAP never bothered. Now dotNet is over 18 months shipping and still no interest in a driver.
Well, ODBC is the best choice, because it will work for UNIX and Windows since there are ODBC implementation like unixODBC. I've never been a fan of the ODBC bridge for OLEDB, but many Application only offer ODBC support. For example you cannot link a table from an OLEDB source into MS Access although it is a Microsoft product. That's strange.
It isn't just my personal interest, I fear that SAPDB / MaxDB seems to continue to ignore a huge target - taking on Windows Server users. SAPDB has equal kernel support for Windows and Unix platforms. SAPDB could be an ideal product for people migrating from Oracle or SQL Server but still wanting to stay on Windows Server for the OS (it is not uncommon to have a company who is willing to switch DB's but not willing to switch OS until solution proven).
Well, i'm using Java currently. So i don't have the problems you have. Since OLEDB is more modern API, i'd use OLEDB too if i'd had to design a Windows application.
It is for the same reason that I am hopeful SAPDB will have a FreeBSD port.
Since the SAPDB is a "melting pot" of languages and complication build processes, building and porting is not that easy. MySQL AB will hopefully change this so that we'll have ports for all favourite UNIX systems.
Most _clients_ are Windows... and SAPDB has done the most to neglect the drivers on that platform. dotNet is the Microsoft modern architecture (their Java clone).
Well, what kind of drivers does .NET use? Is there a .NET API like JDBC that's independant of ODBC, OLEDB etc.?
From my perspective, PostgreSQL is the major free competitor to SAPDB / MaxDB. Alas, they have neglected the Win32 server platform (which they are addressing a native port (not cygwin) in 7.4).
I tried to use Postgresql some years ago, than i retried some weeks ago. I'd still like to use the table inheritance. This feature is badly broken in current PostGreSQL releases. I'm not sure if it ever worked. You can violate primary keys, foreign keys etc. by just inserting data. They said they'd need multi-table indices. I could have told them the same some years ago.
Database software has some responsibility, i'm not sure if PostgreSQL is any good at the moment. I didn't find any list which features are still unstable (like table inheritance). I'd really like to know that before i start developing and thinking about this or that fetaure of PostGreSQL.
SAPDB is ahead of PostgreSQL in the native win32 port. But SAPDB is behind PostgreSQL in FreeBSD/*BSD support + _way behind_ in driver support.
Well, the PostgreSQL uses autoconf, automake etc.. So it's easy for them to do UNIX ports, but a Windows port is still a problem.
And the Cygwin-port cannot be consired to be stable as Cygwin itself isn't recommed for production use. Native Windows PostgreSQL build will come with some of the next releases.
PostgreSQL: ODBC + OleDB + dotNet drivers Firebird & Interbase: ODBC + OleDB + dotNet drivers MySQL: ODBC + OleDB + dotNet drivers (multiple choices for dotNet drivers)
Well, As far as i know, some of the drivers started as usual opensource projects independantly started by individuals. Take the MySQL-JDBC driver for example.
So you're free to start an OLEDB driver for SAPDB/MaxDB. That'd would be great, cause it could be LGPLed since MySQL's drivers (and MaxDB's drivers in future) are all GPL.
SAPDB: ODBC onlywell, and there is JDBC and Python.
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