MaxDB: The enhanced SAP database from MySQL

MySQL has released a souped up, heavy-duty, SAP-certified open source data­base that offers high avail­abil­ity, scal­a­bil­ity and a com­pre­hen­sive fea­ture set for enterprise-level func­tion­al­ity that MySQL's flag­ship data­base lacks (trig­gers, stored pro­ce­dures, and the like)

MySQL had already announced a part­ner­ship with SAP ear­lier this year. Now Busi­ness Wire reports that MySQL has finally for­mally launched MaxDB as the first souped-up, enhanced ver­sion of the SAP's open source DB.

Phew, indeed. Now the naysay­ers of MySQL, who usu­ally denounce it based on its lack of enter­prise class fea­tures such as trig­gers, stored pro­ce­dures etc, or its some­what slug­gish full-text searches (espe­cially on mil­lions of rows), have some­thing to chew on.

MySQL is not a state-of-the-art RDBMS, con­trary to what the hype would have you believe, but it kicks ass if you know its lim­i­ta­tions. Due to its light-weight moor­ings, it's best used in appli­ca­tions and elec­tron­ics devices, with­out end-users hav­ing much aware­ness of the under­ly­ing data­base. An embed­ded MySQL data­base is ideal for use behind the scenes in Inter­net appli­ances, pub­lic kiosks, turn-key hardware/software com­bi­na­tion units, high per­for­mance Inter­net servers and self-contained data­bases dis­trib­uted on CD-ROM.

But with this release of the first fruit from its part­ner­ship with SAP DB, I'm not sure how MySQL intends to fur­ther the Ver­sion 5 of its flag­ship name­sake prod­uct, which was tar­geted at the enter­prise mar­ket any­way and was to include a lot of such func­tion­al­ity, not the least of which was stored pro­ce­dures, repli­ca­tion etc.

Well, two par­al­lel paths of devel­op­ment for pow­er­ful, robust yet solid code can­not be all that bad. MySQL says on its main MaxDB page:

With Post­greSQL 7.4 recently released (detailed changelog here) and Fire­bird 1.5 get­ting very close, the open source rela­tional data­base mar­ket is get­ting pretty inter­est­ing. Both of them have less restric­tive licenses for com­mer­cial close-source appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers, but per­haps nei­ther has the pop­u­lar­ity and momen­tum behind MySQL.

From your per­spec­tive and mine, the best thing about all this: since SAP DB itself was an open source data­base already, you can down­load MaxDB for free as well and play around with it! As Mike Hillyer said: More power to the dolphin!