Friday, April 26, 2013

Yet Another (sigh) SQL Anywhere Q&A Forum

Did you know that for a brief period of time, there were not one, not two, but three official question-and-answer forums devoted exclusively to SQL Anywhere?

  1. the now-defunct NNTP newsgroups,

  2. the excellent SQLAnywhere-Forum.sybase.com website, and

  3. the brand-new "SAP Sybase SQL Anywhere Discussions (Forum)".
The good news is, the NNTP newsgroups are finally gone... after several years of inaction by Sybase it took a takeover by SAP to make it happen.

The bad news is, once again there are two different forums to choose from when deciding where to ask a question about SQL Anywhere (2 and 3 above).

The good news is, the new SAP forum appears to be indexed by Google (whew! it didn't have to be the case).

The bad news is, the whole SAP Community Network website has an awkward, cluttered and confusing design... and in particular the SAP SQL Anywhere forum is clunky and hard to use when compared with SQLAnywhere-Forum.sybase.com.

Enough windmills!


The SAP Community Network website can't help the way it is: it's a all-encompassing corporate creation with no place for best-of-breed solutions like the software running SQLAnywhere-Forum.sybase.com. Sybase almost created one of those (the Sybase Developer Network) but decided not to waste spend the money.

To put it another way, if SQLAnywhere-Forum.sybase.com is replaced by the SAP forum, it's not the end of the world... having one place to ask questions might be a good thing.

On the other hand, if SQL Anywhere is put through some kind of committee meat-grinder, THAT'S the end of the world.

Dilbert 2009-10-09


1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have been determined to look at the bright side of this whole takeover. But it sure is getting harder-and-harder as more-and-more stuff "that just works the way it should work" gets sucked into the stuff "that has to be buried so deep in complexity" that even experienced SQLA users can't find it.

Sigh.
Bill