August 8, 2005

MySQL, SAP, and MaxDB

MySQL is like a star high school athlete — impressive skills and potential, but it still only excels at a limited range of mainly simple things. Will it grow into a robust, adult star? I think so, and here’s a big part of the reason why: MaxDB and SAP certification.

MaxDB is a database product that bounced among all the major German computer hardware and software companies: Nixdorf, Siemens, Software AG, and SAP. (What little fame it ever had was primarily under the name Adabas-D.) SAP eventually shipped MaxDB as the underlying DBMS at many R3 installations. This is a huge sign of OLTP industrial-strengthness; if a DBMS can run SAP’s apps, it can run pretty much anything. OK, not necessarily retail banking, airline reservations, and so on — but pretty much anything else.

Well, two years ago MySQL (the company) and SAP agreed to what amounts to a slow-motion merge between MySQL (the product) and MaxDB. The resulting joint product (currently still quite separate from MySQL 5.0) is undergoing a multi-year process of achieving SAP certification. Everybody involved clearly expects this certification to eventually succeed — in 2-3 years, probably, or perhaps less if they were being really coy with me.

And when that happens, there will be a version of MySQL that is unquestionably fit for rigorous OLTP.

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Comments

4 Responses to “MySQL, SAP, and MaxDB”

  1. DBMS2 — DataBase Management System Services»Blog Archive » So how robust is Ingres? on November 14th, 2005 5:38 am

    […] Where Ingres definitely seems to lag is in data warehousing. E.g., there are no materialized views, and I bet that even if they have some of the index types such as bitmaps, star schemas, etc., the implementation, optimizer support, administrative support, and so on lag far behind that of Oracle and IBM. So again, the proper comparison for Ingres isn’t Oracle and IBM; it’s fellow open source vendor MySQL. Only — deserved or not, MySQL has a ton of momentum for such a small company, incuding an attractive product plan partially fueled by SAP. […]

  2. DBMS2 — DataBase Management System Services»Blog Archive » on December 9th, 2005 2:42 pm

    […] And of course, the memory-centric ROLAP tool BI Accelerator — technology that’s based on TREX — is just another example of how SAP is willing to go beyond passively connecting to a single RDBMS. And while their sponsorship of MaxDB isn’t really an example of that, it is another example of how SAP’s strategy is not one to gladden the hearts of the top-tier DBMS vendors. • • • […]

  3. DBMS2 — DataBase Management System Services»Blog Archive » SAP, MaxDB, and MySQL, updated on January 26th, 2006 5:33 pm

    […] I’ve had a chance to clarify and correct my understanding of the relationship between SAP, MaxDB, and MySQL. The story is this: […]

  4. Software Memories»Blog Archive » Software AG memories on December 8th, 2007 5:34 pm

    […] by Darmstadt, then spun out and taken public again, then bought again. The company came out with ADABAS-D and Tamino, neither of which was a great success. Even so, it’s still alive, kicking, and […]

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