Migration from ADABAS-D to SAPDB - some problems/questions

Hi,
I use ADABAS-D for all my database projects for quite some tim now and 
consider migrating to SAPDB (mainly because of cost/availability/support 
issues).

Things look pretty similar in SAPDB and I installed the 7.4 rpm's on my SuSE 
8.0 server (the distributed SuSE-SAPDB-7.3 rpm's did not work) and created a 
database - no problems so far. Anyway there are some open questions:

1) In ADABAS-D I had some scripts for creating the tables/users. For this I 
piped the sql-commands in a program called "xquery" - this seems to be not 
available with SAPDB. How would someone do this with SAPDB? I saw that "xsql" 
is "back" (this tool was available in former ADABAS-D distributions and we 
used this before xquery) but I don't know if "xsql" will remain in future 
SAPDB-verions. So - should I use "dbmcli" instead? Or the new "loader"? Or 
write python.sql/loader scripts?

2) I use python a lot for scripting etc. and want to use it with SAPDB. There 
seem to be 2 SAPDB interfaces: sapdb.sql and sapdb.dbapi. What is the 
difference between these two interfaces? Which one should I use? It seems 
there is no documentation for sapdb.dbapi? Is there some tutorial or some 
example scripts?

3) As I don't use Windows and sometimes prefer a GUI over a command line tool 
I tried to do some some tasks with "webdbm". Basically it works but when I 
try to alter parameters, I cannot press the "OK" button, in other words, 
nothing happens when I press it. Maybe there is some JavaScript problem? I 
use Mozilla 1.3. With Konqueror it seems that webdbm does not work at all.

4) When loading data, which tool should I use? The new "loader"? Or the 
replication manager?

5) The Documentation is good, although it is somehow confusing in the 
beginning. What I (and probably others) would like to see are examples, like 
example perl/python scripts, sample database setup scripts, loader scripts 
etc. Some kind of tutorial/HOWTO/first steps that proves that setting up a 
SAPDB is not that complicated as it seems in the first place. ;-)

Anyway, thank you a lot for making SAPDB open source, to my mind this is a big 
step forward for the open source movement.

		Best Regards,
		Hermann

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