The history of MaxDB goes back to SAP DB, SAP AG's DBMS. That is, MaxDB is a re-branded and enhanced version of SAP DB. For many years, MaxDB has been used for small, medium, and large installations of the mySAP Business Suite and other demanding SQL applications requiring an enterprise-class DBMS with regard to the number of users, the transactional workload, and the size of the database.
SAP DB was meant to provide an alternative to third-party database systems such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and DB2 by IBM. In October 2000, SAP AG released SAP DB under the GNU GPL license (see Section G.1, “GNU General Public License”), thus making it Open Source software.
Today, MaxDB is used in about 3,500 SAP customer installations worldwide. Moreover, the majority of all DBMS installations on Unix and Linux within SAP’s IT department rely on MaxDB. MaxDB is tuned toward heavy-duty online transaction processing (OLTP) with several thousand users and database sizes ranging from several hundred GB to multiple TB.
In 2003, SAP and MySQL concluded a partnership and development cooperation agreement. As a result, SAP's database system SAP DB has been delivered under the name of MaxDB by MySQL since the release of version 7.5 (November 2003).
Version 7.5 of MaxDB is a direct advancement of the SAP DB 7.4 code base. Therefore, the MaxDB software version 7.5 can be used as a direct upgrade of previous SAP DB versions starting 7.2.04 and higher.
The former SAP DB development team at SAP AG is responsible, now as before, for developing and supporting MaxDB. MySQL AB cooperates closely with the MaxDB team at SAP around delivering improvements to the MaxDB product, see Section 1.5, “Overview of the MaxDB Database Management System”. Both SAP AG and MySQL AB handle the sale and distribution of MaxDB. The advancement of MaxDB and the MySQL Server leverages synergies that benefit both product lines.
MaxDB is subjected to SAP AG's complete quality assurance process before it is shipped with SAP solutions or provided as a download from the MySQL site.
User Comments
Small clarification. The rdbms was a 1977! project at Berlin Tech. with Nixdorf support, and released as a Nixdorf product in the '80s. Siemans bought Nixdorf ~1990. They forked code to a product sold in the US as Cincom/Supra. Meanwhile Software AG, a company selling a neat network dbms called Adabas mostly on mainframes, licensed the product and sold it on minicomputers as Adabas-D.
Adabas-D is completely different in model and interface to Adabas proper. Software AG walked from the mini. market ~97 forcing SAP to take the product over. SAP invested in the product, using it for small/mid customers and as an internal component called "live cache", kind of a datamart server. SAP open sourced it a couple of years ago, and then in '03 assigned it to MySQL AB.
The saga is kind of the Kalavala of the rdbms market - big companies, storms of war, changing tides.
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