This isn't news, actually - they released sources about a month ago and were releasing free binaries some months earlier, when they first made their plans to open source public.
Yes, we should be *very* interested in supporting this data base. In fact, if there's anyone here who has a personal interest in this who's not actively involved in the 4.x project, I'd encourage them to bring up SAP DB and start experimenting with it.
I'd like to know how hard it is to set up, configure, etc. I'd like to know something about the client interface. They have support for calling the db from Perl and Python which should provide nice examples of how hard it is to use the client library. Is it multi-threaded? If so we could write a native OpenNSD driver for it. If not, an external driver, maybe even the ODBC driver, would have to be used, which does impact performance somewhat (not as bad as it did in AOLserver 2.* though!)
I'd like to know some details about their programmatic language, since ACS 4.x is so dependent on the in-db API.
I don't really want to see us divert resources from the immediate goal of getting OpenACS 4.x up and running with Postgres, though.
It will be surprisingly easy to port OpenACS 4.x to other full-featured RDBMS's, and SAP DB is a very, very interesting target.
