SAP to Buy Sybase for $5.25 Billion | Hacker News Reader

SAP to Buy Sybase for $5.25 Billion

dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com

36 pointsmikek21 comments

Perhaps this is the proper forum to ask this question: I simply don't understand what SAP is form? Isn't it just a bunch of forms sitting on top a database? How is it different from Oracle services?

What a fantastic question. SAP is a form on top of a database the way Emacs is a text editor. From a certain point of view that is sort of true, but you only need to scratch the surface to see the gigantic morass lying underneath.

SAP is meant to automate business processes. In particular, it focuses on general business processes that cross industries, plus specific business process that apply generally within an industry.

For instance, cross-cutting processes might be procurement, accounts receivable, accounts payable, asset management, general ledger, invoicing, payroll, time and expense entry, contract management etc. Each of these single functions has a set of common forms that can be customized with the master data of the specific implementation (select box 1 has values Product A, Product B and Product C), plus any custom business rules (field A value X means field B is disabled).

And for your next trick, get everyone to agree on the set of forms, the transitions between forms, the required validations, the exact right set of master data, and other business rules.

And that is barely scratching the surface.

From a modern point of view, SAP's architecture feels pretty alien. In a way you're right, and it's a massive amount of forms on top of a database, plus staggering amounts of business logic. But as it was born before the web, it does not render to HTML, but to it's own display system. Most parts are written in ABAP, an interpreted language, and the source code is stored in the database. A quite usable IDE and a debugger are included. The source code is there, so you can read it and explore how things happen.

There's a database abstraction layer, which works around some limitations of the underlying databases. What SAP sees as a table might be a set of tables in the database.

It's not an unpleasant system to work with.

I'll have to take your word for it, as there doesn't seem to be a way to take a casual look around the product. But thank you for explaining it to me.

$5.25 Billion! Wow. Who uses Sybase??

I feel out of touch. The only enterprise DBs I run into these days are Oracle and MSSQL.

It's popular in the financial sector because of the speed of it's mathematical functions. Back 10 years ago Sybase was the default at the bank I worked at.

In particular Sybase IQ is popular in finance companies since it's based on a column storage engine which makes for very fast aggregation queries (albeit at the expense of slower inserts and updates). Speed matters when you're working with tables with over a billion rows.

Sybase isn't really in the enterprise DB space anymore. That part of the business still exists, but it's not really what they push, as far as I've been told. These days, they primarily do client-server middleware for mobile devices. Device tracking, remote wiping / encryption, that kind of stuff.

Not true at all. They do have other lines of business, but their databases business continues to grow. See http://seekingalpha.com/article/185179-sybase-inc-q4-2009-ea..., e.g.

They still make huge bank in the enterprise DB space. I would imagine middleware for mobile is a tiny amount of their revenue.

Sybase is still quite popular in the investment banking world. GS is a big enough client that their ASE 12.5 installations are still being supported despite it officially being EOL for everyone else...

I think BGI is using an even older version. Those guys handle a few billion trades a day using Sybase, and I don't see them upgrading any time soon. They tried switching to Oracle a few years back but the project got canned.

When I was there at BGI, almost all the business logic was encoded in Sybase triggers & stored procs. It was pretty painful debugging a trade due to all the triggers.

Sybase is pretty popular in the financial sector.

i didn't even know sybase was still around. i thought microsoft acquired some kind of sybase technology and started selling it as mssql?

Due to a very poorly structured deal MSFT was able to use Sybase's own code to compete against them. Be careful who writes your contracts.

My company still uses Sybase. Wish we didn't, but our stored procs are so complex that switching vendors would be very expensive.

It used to be true that Sybase stored procs can by converted to MS-SQL with not much effort, but I guess over the years they've drifted apart quite a bit?

This makes sense given that MySQL is a property of Oracle now. SAP likely wants their own database in order to not be dependent.

SAP own the free DBMS MaxDB - so aren't exactly dependent, although Sybase have a much more diverse product range. Interesting developments in the enterprise space.

Does SAP run on MySQL? I never used SAP but it seems 'enterprisey' enough to demand some pretty special DB.

Basically 90% of their customers are on Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL. Apparently they tried something with MySQL (http://www.sap.com/press.epx?pressid=2208) but never went anywhere.

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