Mark's Travels

10 years of travel blogging from 35+ countries around the world

Table Fires, boring times, databases 5th February 2003 in Bremen, Germany


Things have been pretty boring this week, went for a pint last night, went to a movie the other night, went to Anja"s brothers Daughters Baptism and one of the decorations at my table caught fire. Friday will be good. I"ll have plenty of photos from friday night posted here. Anyway, to give you an idea of how exciting it is here, I found these intereting:


Oracle, Sybase, Infomix and IBM used to be the competitors for the Database market. Sybase licensed its technology to Microsoft, who created SQL Server (read: squeal server) from Sybase v 4.9. That was many years ago, around the sametime that Sybase bought Powersoft to get its product "Powerbuilder", the big 4GL of the early 90s. For you children on the board that was when Visual Basic was in its infancy and the web had 1000 sites. The big database companies now are Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - in that order. The big ERP companies are SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft - in that order. The big CRM companies are Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle and Salesforce.com - in that order. Sybase buying Avantgo is just another way for VCs to get an exit using capital which is sitting on the sidelines.

SAP is more like grape nehi, if this company doesnt implode it will be a crime. My company switched to SAP about 2yrs ago, what a POS! The user interface is so inconsistent that you have to search each screen to find the button. I wonder if they have a rand(UI) function built in. In another stroke of genius, it requires the user to enter the warehouse that contains the part, now how the fuck! would a user know that! Oh, and lets not forget the crappy translation from German and the endless abbreviations for poorly translated German terms. Clearly all the programmers at SAP skipped DB-101, or perhaps all the programming was done by curry who didnt know WTF they were doing anyway.


I think it"s time I took a vacation from my vacation or something...


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