SAP AG and Sybase Inc have thrown away 18 months of development and won’t be releasing a version of R/3 for Sybase after all. There had been talks of delays in the past, but SAP revealed this week the project was dead. SAP told our sister publication, Software Futures, that it had stopped development on R/3 for Sybase two months ago, and told Computergram yesterday that it couldn’t comment because there is no relationship with Sybase. Sybase put on a brave face, but admitted SAP had de-emphasized development, despite the database company sending over developers and technical assistance at various times. Sybase emphasized that it’s going to keep playing with SAP rivals PeopleSoft Inc and Baan Co NV. SAP’s problem supporting Sybase may has stemmed from the fact that Sybase can’t do row level locking the way other database firms do it. Sybase said that issue wasn’t solely to blame, since Microsoft SQL server can’t do row level locking either, but R/3 was still able to support it. Currently R/3 applications can run on Sybase, but they eat up enough resources to make you question the point.
