Try getting your average office worker to deal with an SQL database directly. No chance unless it only has a single table. A database without an interface tailored for a specific purpose is useless for office staff. I know this from experience having once tried to get office staff using pgAdmin to update the shiny new database I had designed for them.

What's funny is that this is what SQL was originally designed for. That's why it reads so much like English. Of course, CLIs were too.

Because it's your business logic. And your GUI builder. And your tax system. And your legal report generator. Etc.

Yes I've heard that often businesses mould themselves to the software, rather than the other way around. The argument is that decades of exposure means that, if not entirely optimal, it at least represents competent processes for running a very large and complicated business. Rolling your own multinational tax compliance in SQL would be madness.

Why would you use an ecommerce platform instead of a regular SQL database?

When you're doing eCommerce.

My point exactly.

I don't know about SAP in particular, but ERP solutions frequently use SQL on the backend. I work with Microsoft Dynamics and it's just a SQL database with a special front-end for constructing workflows. I suspect Oracle ERP would be similar and have Oracle on the backend as well.

Because the ERP solution comes with a gaggle of sales people, sales eng, and bizdev folks to convince your co's decision makers that it is best thing since butter.

SQL doesn't.

"SQL doesn't"... you are correct, SQL can't figure out how much tax you need to pay across 9 tax jurisdictions. SQL can't tell me the best way for my warehouse picking robots to move across the floor based on the layout of the warehouse and what others products are being picked right this second plus over the next few minutes. The list is really endless of what SAP will do and SQL won't. It would take decades to replicate what SAP does.

I mean I guess you can throw all that functionality in a bunch of triggers but that would slow down your database to a crawl every time one record updated.

Have the triggers publish to service broker!

I used to implement ERP systems. I don't anymore.

SAP released new IFRS tax compliance features last year to match the latest government regulations; they then gave this is over 4000 customers for free. It cost SAP around 1.2 million EURO to build, test and roll out. Are you saying that those 4000 customers (companies) should have just built their own tax compliance finance systems? That would have cost 4000 * 1.2 million which would be a total economic spend of four billion eight hundred million... how about you put your ego on the shelf and listen to other people?

You're advocating building massive software applications over using what's already available and you're advocating that all companies do this... you completely ignored my argument and you have no idea what you're talking about. Just because you write crappy webapps in JS that doesn't mean you understand the software market at all.

Sounds like SAP does custom App building. Do they use a custom underlying database technology as well?

Would it be equivalent to contracting some software system to a a company that would build the system using SQL?