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 Appendix J, 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.
