[lug] Bookkeeping Software

[John Karns]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, D. Stimits said:

> I remember a few years ago the Linux Journal had an advertisement for a
> commercial package designed for medium to large business. I mentioned it
> to one of the financial officers of a manufacturing firm I worked for
> back then, and she had said that it was quite well known accounting
> software, but only in the big business world (and not the Linux version,
> just the software in general). You could buy optional packages to add
> almost any functionality to it, and I think an average package price was
> something around $50k at the time, +/- $25k depending on options.
> So...if you mean *really extensive (and expensive)* software for large
> companies, I know it is out there, though I can't recall what the brand
> name was. I haven't heard of any "claimed wonderful" software for free
> in that area.

I seem to remember reading a few years back that a Linux version of SAP
was available - from Software AG, the Adabas people.  I had looked at
Adabas D back when it was at version 6.x to use as a DB server backend.
I thought that the Adabas D feature set was impressive (transactions,
fully distributed DB capability, ...), although the interface was
definitely outdated mainframe type stuff.  Unfortunately, they were really
lax with their documentation, and a lot of it was / is in German.
Fortunately, PostgreSQL matured rapidly and came to the rescue (at least
as far as transactions), and the documentation (source code, the ultimate
in documentation :-] ) is definitely a big improvement over that of
Adabas.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net