Re: SAPDB/MaxDB - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, dirk@riehle.org (Dirk Riehle) wrote:
> It may be a non-starter in this forum for a discussion, but I'd be
> curious to know what people think about SAP's former SAPDB, now
> MaxDB. This was SAP's first venture, I believe, into open source. What
> do you think about it? What do you think SAP should have done back
> then? What do you think SAP could or should be doing today? Could it
> benefit the PostgreSQL community in anyway?

As Bruce pointed out, the codebase for SAP-DB (aka MaxDB, aka
Adabas-D) was written in a simultaneous combination of:
 - mainframe acronymese
 - German
 - Pascal
 - C++
which, in the presence of custom build tools that were very much *not*
Make/autoconf, made for an enormous "learning curve" in order to get
involved with the codebase.

As far as SAP AG was concerned, the point of it was NOT for them to
get into OSS; it was for them to come up with a lever to beat on
Oracle with.

Every so often, SAP and Oracle get into fights over their
relationship; SAP sells more Oracle licenses than anyone else on the
planet, which makes for a love/hate relationship on both sides.  On
the one hand, R/3 + Oracle makes both companies a barrel of money, so
they otta love one another.  On the other hand, Oracle sells some ERP
software, and would rather get *ALL* the licensing fees.

If SAP had their own database, they could play the same game back,
hence the late-90's acquisition of Adabas-D.

In principle, SAP AG ought to be able to readily do ports of their
software to run atop PostgreSQL (just as they do on Oracle, MS-SQL
Server, Informix, Adabas-D, and DB2), as PostgreSQL has enough
functionality to host something like R/3.

I'd say that there's a little bit of danger in such interest; it means
getting in between SAP AG and Oracle Corporation, and with the amount
of competitiveness between those companies, that seems to me to be a
dangerous place to be.

MySQL AB tried getting into that spot, and Oracle spent last year
buying storage engines out from under them.

Doesn't sound like a fun place to be to me...
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