MaxDB is an

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

SQL-92 SQL-92 (also called SQL 2) was the third revision of the SQL database query language. Unlike SQL-89, it was a major revision of the standard. Aside from a few minor incompatibilities, the SQL-89 standard is forward-compatible with SQL-92. The ...

(entry level) compliant

relational database management system A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

( RDBMS) from

SAP AG Sap is a fluid transported in the xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a sep ...

, which was also delivered by

MySQL AB MySQL AB was a Swedish software company founded in 1995. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, Sun was in turn acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. MySQL AB is the creator of MySQL, a relational database management system, as well a ...

from 2003 to 2007. MaxDB is targeted for large SAP environments e.g. mySAP Business Suite, and other applications that require enterprise-level database functionality.

History

The database development started in 1977 as a research project at

Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin; also known as Berlin Institute of Technology and Technical University of Berlin, although officially the name should not be translated) is a public university, public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was the first ...

headed by Rudolf Munz. In the early 1980s it became a database product that was subsequently owned by Nixdorf Computer, Siemens-Nixdorf,

Software AG Software GmbH, trading as Software AG, is a German multinational software corporation that develops enterprise software for business process management, integration, and big data analytics. Founded in 1969, the company is headquartered in Darmstad ...

and today by

. It has at various times been named VDN, RDS, Reflex, Supra 2, DDB/4, Entire SQL-DB-Server and Adabas D. In 1997 SAP acquired the software from Software AG and developed it as SAP DB, releasing the source code under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

in October 2000. In 2003 SAP AG and MySQL AB jointly re-branded the database system as MaxDB. In October 2007 this reselling agreement was terminated and sales and support of the database were reverted to SAP. SAP AG now manages MaxDB development, distribution, and support. New versions of the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of MaxDB are no longer available under the GNU General Public License. SAP also stated that "Further commercial support concepts to cover mission critical use requirements outside of SAP scenarios are currently subject to discussion." MaxDB since version 7.5 is based on the code base of SAP DB 7.4. Therefore, the MaxDB software version 7.5 can be used as a direct upgrade of previous SAP DB versions starting at 7.2.04 and higher. SAP has announced that there will be no minor or major updates after version 7.9. SAP is sunsetting the product, favoring the HANA database instea

Features

MaxDB is delivered with a set of administration and development tools. Most tools are available with both a GUI and

command line interface A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternati ...

(CLI). It offers bindings for

JDBC Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the Java (programming language), Java programming language which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java ...

;

ODBC In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. An ...

; SQLDBC (native C/C++ interface); precompiler; PHP;

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

; Python;

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...

; OLE DB, ADO, DAO, RDO and

.NET The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...

via

;

Delphi Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient Classical antiquity, classical world. The A ...

and Tcl via Third Party Programming Interfaces. MaxDB is

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

, offering releases for

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a proprietary software, proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise; current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architect ...

IBM AIX AIX (pronounced ) is a series of Proprietary software, proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM since 1986. The name stands for "Advanced Interactive eXecutive". Current versions are designed to work with Power ISA based ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, Solaris, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and up to Microsoft Windows 10. MaxDB offers built-in hot backup, does not need any online reorganizations and claims to be SQL 92 Entry-Level compatible. MaxDB since version 7.7.00, uses

multiversion concurrency control Multiversion concurrency control (MCC or MVCC), is a non-locking concurrency control method commonly used by database management systems to provide concurrent access to the database and in programming languages to implement transactional memory. ...

(MVCC) instead of the previous lock based implementation.

Licensing

MaxDB was licensed under the

(GPL) from versions 7.2 through 7.6. Programming interfaces were licensed under the GPL with exceptions for projects released under other open source licenses. SAP DB 7.3 and 7.4 were licensed as GPL but with

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

drivers. MaxDB 7.5 was offered under dual licensing, i.e. licensed as GPL with GPL drivers or a commercial license. From version 7.5 through version 7.6 onwards distribution of MaxDB (previously SAP DB) to the open source community was provided by MySQL AB, the same company that develops the open-source software database,

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

. Development was done by SAP AG,

and the

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

community. In October 2007 SAP assumed full sales and commercial support for MaxDB. MaxDB 7.6 is now

closed source Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...

, available free-of-charge (without support, and with usage restrictions) for use with non-SAP applications.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://maxdb.sap.com/ Proprietary database management systems SAP SE

History

Features

Licensing

See also

References

External links