Top 5 Database Platforms – the Developer Experience Exposed.
I was pinged lately by someone bemoaning the state of SAP HANA developer tools and I was slightly surprised. I thought that SAP had done a fairly good job of making things available, but then I am a SAP partner, with paid access to downloads, test/demo licenses and support.
[edit 01/27/13]: This page has got a lot of foot traffic so I thought it good to clarify what this comparison is about.
Developers, startups and small companies make a choice of what database platform to use. Students and new talent in the market make the same choice. Sometimes that choice is made because of what people know, what’s cool and trending, or what’s open-source, what’s cheap, or what’s “expensive and enterprise class” – Jeff Bezos famously cited this as the reason why he chose Oracle for Amazon.com. There are a bunch of reasons that determine DB platform choice.
However, I believe that a lot of the time, people choose what is easy to access and so it’s my belief that if SAP wants to be a DB Platform giant (and they do), they have to lead the way in developer experience. This comparison, and grading, is all about how easy it is to get started and develop your first app. It’s about ecosystem latency.
So I chose what I believed to be the 5 (yeah it turned out to be 7 because of scope creep…) major database platform choices, and I scored them based on:
– Ease of finding the developer resource pages via Google
– Ease of getting signed up as a developer
– Ease of getting the the development platform up and running
I gave extra points for organizations that give flexibility and choice, and I dock points for:
– Needing to deal with a sales team to get access
– Needing to wait for approval to get access
– Bad user experience
Now you know how I’m judging them – let’s get on with the analysis!
Microsoft
I googled “Microsoft SQL Server developer” to see what was available. Microsoft have had an amazing developer program since the 90s and I remember being a part of it during university. First link on Google is the Microsoft SQL Server Dev Center. Less than 60 seconds later I have a 64-bit version of Microsoft SQL Server Express downloading – without even a click-through license! This happens when you come to install it.
Whilst it’s downloading, Microsoft displayed a 5-step getting started process with links to training content, assistance, Twitter and forums. I’m already pretty impressed – Microsoft have made it simple and easy to access their developer platform.
And I look to the right of the page – they also have a link to a 90 day free trial of their Azure SQL Cloud Platform. It’s got some limitations – 35Gb of data, for example – but that’s pretty cool. I looked into the pricing model and got very confused. Amazon clearly do a much better job than Microsoft at pricing.
If on-premise enterprise databases are your bag, Microsoft do a free 180-day trial of their full-fat Microsoft SQL Server 2012 platform. Also downloading within 60 seconds without a click-through. It’s worth noting that you do need a free 180-day trial of the Windows 2012 operating system and a minimum of 4GB RAM. This is made available either as a full download, or a virtual image.
Once downloaded, Microsoft are masters of the developer experience. Installing software and tools is straightforward and the tools are a pleasure to use. There’s no question – for on-premise software, Microsoft are the guys to beat.
[edit 01/27/13]: I reviewed Microsoft first, and having slept on this post, I realized that whilst Microsoft do make it easy to get their software, they haven’t really innovated on open-ness. There are, however, a good collection of AWS packages for Microsoft Windows/SQL Server. IBM do a much better job of making the information easy to find.
Grade: B-. Microsoft have enabled me, got me up and running with their software quickly and I’m already developing on their platform.
Oracle
I don’t have such high expectations of Oracle: they have always been tougher with intellectual property. Maybe they have improved in recent years – let’s find out. First impressions look great, there is a landing page for downloading the Oracle 11g software. You have to craft your Google search carefully, because googling “Oracle trial” lets you know just how litigious the company is!
Once you agree to the license agreement and click on a download, it then forwards you to a login page. A few minutes later and some fiddling around with bad support for the Safari browser, I’m busy downloading Oracle 11g. You can run this on the Microsoft trial version of Windows if you like, or you could run it on some variant of UNIX or Linux. The choice is yours.
The installer for Oracle isn’t quite as friendly as Microsoft and the developer tools are not as polished. It’s clear to me that becoming an Oracle developer is a more serious undertaking than in Microsoft. But then according to Indeed, Oracle guys are paid on average 10% more than Microsoft guys. Still, there’s definitely a bit of a sense that Oracle haven’t moved this stuff forward in the way that Microsoft have, especially when it comes to virtual images, and the cloud.
I also hear that Oracle have an in-memory database called TimesTen. It turns out that there is a download page for that too. Since I now have a login, it takes me 20 seconds to get this on its way down. I’m really impressed by the TimesTen hardware requirements: there is a 32-bit download if you need it (limited to a 2GB database, obviously) and on the 64-bit edition, it’s just a question of how much RAM you have. Fair enough.
Grade: C. Oracle don’t have the impressive platform that Microsoft have, but if you’re a serious developer, that might be acceptable.
Salesforce.com
I bet you didn’t expect me to go here. I’m immediately impressed: they have the domain developer.force.com which is a starting point for all development stuff. I see “Free Developer Edition” and click on it hungrily. It’s a short web form with a confirmation email, and I’m in, in 60 seconds.
This is where I get the shock of my life: I blink, and 60 seconds later, I have written my first app. I barely even saw myself do it, and it gives me a guided tutorial of what I built. I’m not in the mood to take this too much further but I can see there are means to write code, develop database apps and create reports and dashboards. It’s all frighteningly easy. It is no wonder that there are so many Force.com developers.
[edit 01/27/13]: Amigo Chen, see comment below, suggested that I actually review database.com – In fact I did, I just got my terminology wrong. Salesforce.com is the company, force.com is the platform and database.com is the database. That’s what we’re talking about here.
[edit 01/27/13]: This post got a lot of love from the Salesforce.com community, including Benioff. Let’s be clear – SFDC has the best developer experience. Does it have the best app platform? I’m not so sure, and that’s not what this article is about.
SAPs site: “Grade: A+. Developing an app with a cloud-based platform within 60 seconds. This is the bar to aspire to.”scn.sap.com/community/data…
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) January 27, 2013
Grade: A+. Developing an app with a cloud-based platform within 60 seconds. This is the bar to aspire to.
Workday
In for a penny, in for a pound. Workday’s Developer Network (WDN, remind you of anything?) is easy to find but I’m as surprised as I was with Force.com. Workday developer access appears only to be available to Partners and Customers and the web pages are confusing and poorly laid out. I give up.
[edit 01/26/13]: Naomi Bloom pointed out that Workday was deliberately not a database platform. I’d assumed that it was, at least to its customers. Their lack of openness gets a thumbs down from me, but it’s unfair to grade them.
Grade: N/A.
IBM
[edit 01/26/13] This section added with thanks to Vijay Vijaysankar of SAP. Once Blue, always Blue!
My first impression of IBM is they have gone to the effort of creating a brand that is developer-focussed: Developerworks. I went to download the free-of-charge DB2 Express, and this requires the creation of an IBM ID, which took about 60 seconds, plus a confirmation email. One thing I noticed was a Mac OS X Version – the only on-premise solution that has this here, which is pretty cool. From there it’s a direct download.
IBM also has cloud provisioning options. Whilst IBM’s Smart Cloud requires you to contact an account representative (I can’t be bothered), the link to Amazon AWS take you right to an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) where you can directly buy the software. Nice. $111 a month gets you a one-year contract for an 8GB RAM system, or it’s $0.32 an hour, and you can get started right away.
I moved onto DB2, which is available on a 90 day trial for on-premise use, plus a cloud option on a variety of different providers – very impressive. To download it I had to provide a phone number. After that I can download any version for a 90 day trial, either as an installer, or as a VMWare image.
With DB2 in the cloud, you have the same list of options and I chose AWS. You can only get DB2 Enterprise if you use IBM’s SmartCloud but DB2 Workgroup Edition is available on AWS. This is $1.32 an hour, or you can Bring Your Own License if you have one already.
Grade: B+. IBM clearly outdoes Microsoft because of the variety of options. Whatever option you want, IBM has a solution for you. Awesome.
I found the developer site at developer.google.com pretty easily, but it doesn’t work unless you’re on Google Chrome (yuck, Internal Server Error). That’s ridiculous. I’m then faced with a vast number of options… and totally confused. Google has clearly a huge ecosystem but I have no clue where to start.
Some while later I have muddled my way through the confusing user interface and figure out how to use their App Engine to generate a simple web app. I’m surprised by the complexity compared to Force.com. That said, I know how very powerful apps can be built in this platform and I suspect it’s just an up-skilling problem. Google could do much better with the user experience and on-boarding.
Grade: B. Fantastic potential and easy to get started if you know how, but a very unintuitive user interface.
SAP
I feel I’ve done enough research now to do a proper analysis of SAP’s developer access so it’s time to fire up a fresh browser. It’s fair to bear in mind that SAP does have quite a broad portfolio of databases, though that could be considered confusing to developers.
First up, Sybase ASE (Sybase’s relational RDBMS). I find the download page easily and I’m off downloading the software fast. There’s not Microsoft’s sparkle for making it easy to get started and the Sybase database is reminiscent of Oracle (amusing, given that it shares lineage with Microsoft SQL Server). ASE is certified for use in AWS but I can’t find pricing or an image.
For Sybase IQ (Sybase’s columnar analytics database) it takes me longer to find the download page for a 30-day trial (who does 30-day trials of database software?!) but one of the forums has a direct link to the latest version of the software. There is also an Express Edition available and a Developer Center (no, wait, here’s another) but the web pages are fragmented and confusing. I guess the design thinking team were asleep at their desk that day. I can’t find any cloud based editions of IQ, nor any virtual images.
Now onto SAP’s flagship database, SAP HANA. I google “SAP HANA Download” and start to feel rather nervous:
It appears there is no free download of SAP HANA. You have to sign up to be a partner to be able to download it and pay a substantial yearly fee.
So I’ve found there is a 30-day trial of SAP HANA in the cloud. It’s running an old version of SAP HANA 1.0 SP04 and you have to register for the SAP Community Network to get onto it and then wait 48-hours. If I want to get going with SAP HANA right now, I can pay $2500 a month to Amazon for HANA One, which is 60GB of HANA. Alternatively I can pay uCloud $207 a month for a 16GB instance, which will get me started. But I’m cheap so I’m done.
[edit, 01/28/13] – So there are developer editions of SAP HANA for AWS available here that cost $0.45/hour all-inclusive for a basic 16GB instance. If you buy for a year in advance that’s $150 a month, which isn’t so bad.
[edit, Greg Chase asked me to review NetWeaver Cloud. It’s kinda out-of-scope but does run on SAP HANA]
NW Cloud is SAP’s cloud-based app platform. I’m feeling hopeful here as I google “NetWeaver Cloud” and the first page says “Get your free SAP NetWeaver Cloud Developer Edition in 5 minutes”. I click, eagerly. You need to register with SCN to get an account, which is fair enough and I then have to go through a set of screens to accept the product, after which I get the message “Access was denied due to export control restrictions.”
Grade: D. Software availability is poor and web navigation confusing.
Conclusions
My first conclusion is that the on-premise database vendors (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP) are all at varied degrees of maturity with their developer experience. In order, it’s 1) IBM, 2) Microsoft, 3) Oracle and 4) SAP. IBM in particular has a really good option of AWS cloud instances that make getting running as a developer easy, and on-premise software that’s easy to download.
Of the cloud DB vendors (Salesforce.com, Google) – and in fact overall, we have a winner in Salesforce.com. I sat down with SAP co-CEO Jim Snabe last year and told him that he has to think about the developer experience as a process, which starts at a thought and ends at an app – and then obsess about making it easier. This is what Benioff has done with Salesforce. Every piece of unnecessary latency has been taken out of the process.
I’m not convinced that the Database.com platform can compete feature-feature with the SAP HANA and NetWeaver cloud platforms (let alone performance), but for startups and new people deciding what platform to use, that’s often not a factor.
The hard truth is that SAP is way behind even Oracle, who allow a free easy download of their in-memory database. And that’s without taking into account that what the ecosystem needs is a ton of small developer shops producing amazing apps. Those guys don’t have time or patience for the process and cost involved in becoming a SAP HANA developer.
And the fact is this: if SAP wants to be a serious database player, it needs to get access to developers, fast. Here’s what’s needed:
1) A free download of SAP HANA for Linux and Windows and as a VMWare Image. Yes, I know it needs lots of RAM. RAM is cheap.
2) A for-sale developer appliance (Mac Mini or whatever) with 16GB RAM. Yes, it works, I’ve tried it.
3) A free developer cloud edition with 16GB RAM. Put a system together that pauses them and saves them to disk when not in use.
4) A revamp of this SCN website. It’s buggy, hard to use and the database platform tools are all in different places with different user experience.
So, I’m throwing the gauntlet down. SAP wants to be the #2 database vendor by 2015, and to do this it needs as good a database developer experience as Force.com. Microsoft and Oracle are an interesting comparison, but they’re not the bar.
As a functional consultant hard to provide any insights on the actual "grades" and it will be awhile (probably never) before I develop on any of these platforms but I really enjoyed this article and format. We dont see enough comparison between the major vendors IMHO on any level so kudos for getting the ball rolling.
Thanks dude. The lightbulb moment for me was realizing that the comparison to Oracle and Microsoft was futile - they are not the bar, they are the incumbents.
I think it would be an interesting research exercise to try to create an app on each platform and monetize it. I'm not sure about you but I don't have the energy for that 🙂
Very entertaining and informative at the same time.
Funnily enough, I was having a look at the http://developers.google.com site last night and found myself looking at the revamped area for Google APIs. Again, like your experience with force.com, within a few minutes I'd set up, and downloaded a Python sample app, with OAuth all set up for me, and it ran from the command line successfully first time. Great experience, backed up by the Google Developer Live (GDL) programming (reading through the upcoming shows is like browsing the Radio Times of yore) and the API Console.
When I look at what the SAP Developer programme in general has achieved over the past few years, I'm super impressed and encouraged. I know of no other software company with such a massive breadth and depth of offerings, and that alone makes for a huge challenge not only for the developer at large but also for the folks at SAP trying to help us. I applaud their efforts thus far.
dj
Thanks dude.
I deliberately shied away from applauding the hard work that has been done, and was waiting for someone to comment so I could add it (I know it has been a tough battle on many fronts and they have worked hard). I did this for a specific reason:
If SAP wants to compete in the DB platform space, which is increasingly dominated by SFDC, Amazon and Google (perhaps I should have added Google), then looking in the rear view mirror and being self-congratulatory doesn't get them closer to that goal.
Instead, they need to breathe and set a new bar for developer engagement, despite all the history they have to lug around with them.
It's tough, but that's what makes it interesting 🙂
Finding anything free of cost from SAP was not possible at all 3-4 years back. However, now they are more open :-))
SAP have come a long way, but what's the point of looking in the rear view mirror? Instead, they need to set their sights on Google, Amazon and SFDC for developer experience.
No doubt - Salesforce is the clear winner in simple and user friendly UI. Hope, SAP would come something better then this 🙂 Design Thinking..
(Warning: oldtimer response imminent)
That's not quite true. 3-4 years back, heck, 25 years back, SAP developer resources were available aplenty. In the form of lines of source code. Yes, we need tools as software has progressed, and frameworks abound, but there's still a place for reading the source code, documentation, and anything else you can get your hands on.
Want to skill up for HANA DB activities? Get a book on SQL. Want to prepare yourself for HANA XS? Practise coding in JavaScript and get over to http://www.odata.org. And there's nothing stopping you installing a non-HANA DB to practise those SQL skills, or coding JavaScript in the Chrome Developer Console or at http://jsbin.com, and consuming the NetFlix or Northwind OData resources. Fill yer boots!
dj
I'm not sure mate, it works different ways for different people.
The current digital native generation are predisposed to instant gratification and so don't tend to read unless they have to. That's what makes the Google and SFDC experience so compelling - it's creating an app, one click at a time.
I don't wholly disagree. However, I and my grey hair did want to inject some sort of balance, lest the developer today becomes lazy. I'm not saying anyone is, but we shouldn't take everything for granted either. Instant gratification sometimes comes at a price - not fully understanding why things work (or why things don't).
dj
Thanks Dj for your kind advise. I will surely keep them in my mind for future achievements.. As you said there is no doubt at all that, these days Developers are as lazy as Business users..and it all due to super fast advancements in Technology..
Again, maybe I'm just being argumentative today, but 🙂
I don't think developers are (as a genre) lazy, per se. They are just wanting, like the rest of the digital native generation, instant gratification. I think it's an important point to distinguish this from laziness, and our younger developers often work very hard, and merge work and life into one balance.
Talking of laziness, I am reminded of the fact that, in one philosophy at least, laziness is one of the three virtues of a good programmer: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris *
Ah Perl, my old flame.
* Larry Wall, a hero amongst heroes, of course.
Those were the old days. Now you have 5 technologies to choose from, in which to invest your time and career. Will you spend your time trying to learn from a book without having a way to test your code, or developing sample apps in your instant demo system?
Like many others, I pointed out the a Unwired Platform demo was badly needed ... after a while SAP provided a cloud demo (not the same thing but....* ) but it was lost time. Developers got frustrated and went along to try other things. I was one of them.
* It's not the same because the cloud doesn't let you connect to your ERP system, where you have your data, and where demos can mean something.
Hi John,
Superb blog and I really like how you evaluated everything. I was very surprised to see Force.com so high and SAP so low. I did expect a bit more of Workday, only because of their rapid growth.
It is very concerning that HANA is such a central point of SAP's strategy, yet there are so few consultants with the right skillset and no way of consultants getting practical experience with the software. At least as someone with the right connections you can try and make some changes and this piece of research might prove crucial to SAP's long-term growth of the HANA ecosystem,
Best regards,
Luke
Thanks dude, I tried to be objective and think of the experience like an outside developer would, and I was really surprised at the results too.
The good news is I think this is easily fixable and I believe the hard legal work has been done already. Now it's more a matter of policy and resources, both of which SAP has to its advantage.
ok, my vote is for 8GB Apple mini edition and some serious RAM for the cloud subscription without some tricky AWS pricing schemes. force.com comes as a surprise so you have made me look. does DB2 offer columnar option? also, Big Blue has a limited experience in micro IT as they prefer large accounts to deal with.
DB2 offers columnar compression, not storage.
IBM have two other databases: the Netezza Database appliance, which is a parallel processing x86 design, and the TM1 in-memory database, which is OLAP and used primarily for planning scenarios, though I heard they were porting it for use with SPSS Predictives.
TM1 seems to be OLAP only with no real transaction engine. DB2's columnar compression comes close to what HANA can do if you include the traditional work it has been doing since the beginnings of RDBMS. SPSS porting seems to be a good move, esp with regards to SAS.
still, i think SAP has an opportunity to cash on its early moves in the social media space, so hopefully they will take your evaluation seriously to heart and try to win the hearts and minds (and eyeballs) of us 'pedestrians' before grabbing the budgets of the C-suite SI's. open hpi is already doing some of that.
I think you should user database.com to replace force.com in this comparison.
Force.com is a mix of page rendering and database solutions while database.com is the database cloud service only. You need to host a page render service, eg php, in other cloud service.
Both provide good database configuration like create table, set relationship, trigger, and etc.
The big issue to me using Salesforce is the cost of database storage. US 500/mb/month on salesforce.com. 😯
Right - it's a terminology problem and I've updated the post to match.
I'm not convinced - and it's not the point of this post - that SFDC is the best database platform. There's price, poor analytics performance and the relative lack of flexibility that go against it.
But for developer experience, they kick ***.
I agree with your post.
SAP should aim to do something similar to what Microsoft does with SQL Server, a free developer edition download, maybe with a 16GB/4Cpus limit or something like that. 8GB is barely enough to cover the system overhead.
I'm fortunate to have upgraded my own computer to 32GB of ram and have been playing with HANA on a VM with 28GB/8 cpus, but i can only access the download because of partner status.
Give the openness and simplicity of HANA in regards to development, it should be simpler to access and install it, maybe even have available a Windows version like you've mentioned on a previous post.
Come on SAP, don't hold back the dev community on HANA and give broader access to developers 🙂
SAP are pretty good at listening and I'm hopeful. Watch this space.
G'day John,
Interesting post. You seem a bit confused between databases and development platforms - you already touch on the salesforce example, but I don't think you could consider Google's GAE as a DBMS. Additionally, I would be concerned if ease of installation was a major part of the selection criteria my developers were using to select their technologies, tools or platforms - what about platform security, ease of reuse, coding efficiency, compatibility with the current tools etc ?
I'd like to come at this from another perspective - How easy is it to integrate any of these databases into my current environment (i.e. the complete stack) ? For example, i can use DBCON to connect pretty much any database with my SAP system. I don't know how easy it connect legacy ERPs (such as SAP, JDE, etc) with salesforce....
BTW, with relation to a developer version of HANA, what is the problem with the HANA One system available through AWS (apart from the fact that at the time of writing, they don't provide one in the Australian region...) ?
hth
Hey Martin
You mention GAE, and yes, that has BigTable as the database in the backend, but I would argue that GAE is not a standalone DB in the sense that others might be; it is so different as to be considered a PaaS. I know this whole exercise is in danger of turning into ecosystem comparisons rather than DB comparisons, of course, which is, I guess, difficult at best.
dj
Hi John,
Much has already been said, and I too value your efforts to compare some of the major commercial DB players.
That said, I find it strange that, where you aim at developers and startups, you 'only' look at the traditional big software companies. Nothing about open source solutions like mySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite, or the newer databases like Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Redis, Riak, or Neo4J (link: http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/no-sql-new-databases-new-applications-400 ).
So as a comparison between the major vendors (including specifically SAP) you do a very good job (you really do, it must have taken a lot of time trying everything out etc), but as a developer or startup in 2013 these vendors would not even be on my shortlist.
Are you planning a follow up? 🙂
Cheers, Fred
Hi Fred,
your post covered already what I would have posted. Interesting to see that there is right now a very strong movement out there that uses "new" openSource solutions. I have heard a lot of very good things about Mongo for example.
If the post is focused on Commercial Apps I think the most important ones are covered but I would add a few cents of thought to the conclusions. If you create a product (database developer is doing so to some extend) you should always consider the 4 P of Marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion
- Product is to be defined by the developer and based on the product focus could require one or another technology. Still believe that in-memory is great but is not penicillin.
- Price is very important when you consider what market you are targeting and how broad you want your customer base to be.
- Place how many customers could you reach with a solution on a platform ? This is an important question but I would tend to think that Oracle and Microsoft would be winning right now (customer base on open systems) in that respect. Also what is the projected future for the platform = place ?
- Promotion there clearly the SAP HANA Platform would be probably in the winning horse. There is no database about which there is more buzz right now in the marketplace.
I agree with John that SAP could do a much better job on facilitating and educating the field in order to change the current market, but on the other side if I were a developer (and I have to admit I am not...) I would be on the horses on which I could get more traction.
Hey John
"I found the developer site at developer.google.com pretty easily, but it doesn't work unless you're on Google Chrome (yuck, Internal Server Error)" - I think that must be an anomaly, it certainly works in Internet Exploder, for example.
cheers
dj
Unfortunately completely right with your analysis..
I was selling basic ERP licenses for small consulting companies, who wanted just to train their employees to be better consultants or create some addons on Netweaver.
Even tough buying directly from me was a much faster way for them to get their software/dev infrastructure (the "official" partner channel is way to complex), it would make more sense to offer it free & on a easy platform.
The value what SAP would get from a bigger & better trained consulting ecosystem would be much more software revenue.. compared to the peanuts of selling those development licenses...
Hi John,
I'm fully aware that your blog is depicting current situation and is more focused on databases. However I want to point out that SAP was a kind of developer friendly long time ago. I remember what I started with SAP in 2001 (OMG how the tiem is running...!) there was a "small" SAP Basis installation of R/3 available - called miniSAP 4.6. I obtained it via book about ABAP. Even version for Linux (called Technology TestDrive) along with WIN were available. Nowadays there are versions of SAP NetWeaver 2004s for MaxDb and DB2 still available via SCN.
Anyway excelled blog. SAP really needs to to more for the developers!
@SAP: BTW those miniSAP versions could be also updated with the more 7.3 versions of ABAP stack preferably WIN based version of the same.
Cheers, martin
Hi John,
I total agree with your post!
Here is the elephant in the room that the SAPperati are missing:
This should not be new. SAP knows this stuff having seen told about it on numerous occasions.
The really big point is that regardless of how gorgeous HANA may be, if you can't get devs off the starting blocks in double quick time then nothing else matters.
Sorry John, I cannot share your verdict on Oracle. It's 2 clicks from their home page to a pre-configured Oracle DB 11g R2 VM including developer tools. If you want, you can download older releases of their products too. Their JEE VM comes with source control and continuous integration.
I give them an A.
SAP gets an F. Making some trials available on AWS is not developer friendly.
I agree. Trials on AWS are something but it's not the same as being able to setup your own system in your own network, connected to your other systems.
Good post and lot of nice discussions. Biggest growth in database space in the last few years is from MySQL and NoSQL databases. I think 10Gen (MongoDB creator) does an awesome job catering to the developer community and MySQL despite being now owned by ORCL also does a decent job.
Update on CloudShare offer:
All HANA Servers and Desktops upgraded to SPS5 version
Brand-new SAP Visual Intelligence installed on HANA Desktops
John,
I have a different perspective on the SAP HANA developer experience. I have posted my thoughts here http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana/blog/2013/02/12/sap-hana-developer-experience-my-perspective
Hello John,
interesting synthesis.
Did you have a check on this Linux VM called "SCN - SAP HANA, express edition". It should answer some of your requests.
https://store.sap.com/sap/cp/ui/resources/store/html/SolutionDetails.html?pid=0000014440&catID=&sap-language=EN&_cp_id=i…
Great article, I didn't even know about force.com but am checking it out right now. Oh well, I get what all the hype about salesforce is now.
Hello John,
SAP HANA 1.0 , 2.0 SPS DB  is an excellent DB for complex Architecture build, release ,testing ,Migration activity , We are all having experience of HANA  DB speed , row,column with in memory DB to retrieve DB record  . Regards
Asish