When you spend your days working with free software you lose track of the crazy prices of some commercial software products. For example: SQL on the IBM AS/400 (or whatever the platform is called nowadays).
One of my clients, like many AS/400 users, develops his applications in RPG and he does all his database access using RPG's built-in functions. Unfortunately some things like counting the number of rows that meet a certain criteria or complex sorting and grouping are not easy to do in RPG. The only way to do these things is by embedding SQL in your RPG program.
But lo and behold: SQL is not free. You need to pay a license to use it, contrary to the AS/400 database itself which is included free of charge in the base operating system. What does SQL cost? A whopping 1700 euro for a relatively small AS/400 machine (a P10 machine for those of you familiar with AS/400 software licensing)!
That is a hefty price for a piece of software that is considered a commodity on most other platforms.
2 Comments
That's why I wrote Kettle :
Submitted by Matt Casters on
That's why I wrote Kettle : too much information is being locked up in such a way that you have to continuously pay to get at YOUR OWN data. Fortunately, your client has a number of possibilities (including Kettle) that allow you to get a working business intelligence solution in open source. Get the data off the vendor lock-in platform (AS/400) AS/AP.
This is not a business
Submitted by litrik on
This is not a business intelligence project but believe me, the purchase of SQL will allow my client to reduce his dependency on the AS/400 platform.
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