Recommendation of use for MaxDB for production use and Oracle comparison

[LeonardoAraujo]

Hi all,

We are about to propose to a customer of ours the use of SAPDB for production use. This would be a good way to reduce license costs.

Previous use of this DB platform has shown that it is mature, but since I am not a basis or DBA, I can't really pinpoint if we miss a lot of functionality.

Who could provide some info on the following:

1 - Are there major functionalities that Oracle provides that MaxDB doesn't?

2 - Customer reference (or your inputs) on success stories.

Thanks in advance.

Leonardo

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> Who could provide some info on the following:

>

> 1 - Are there major functionalities that Oracle provides that MaxDB doesn't?

I would ask:"What functionalities do you expect from a database system?" - and then "Can MaxDB provide those functionalities?". It does not makes sense, IMHO, to compare "possible" things if you never need them.

> 2 - Customer reference (or your inputs) on success stories.

We run MaxDB (former ADABAS D, former SAPDB) for 12 years now on all our systems. Our main ERP 6.0 EHP4 has a size of 3 TB, we run on Linux serving about 900 users (700 concurrent), a BI with roughly 1 TB (with BWA), CRM with 600 GB, and tons of portals and smaller systems (SRM, SRM-MDM 7.1, GTS 7.2, SolMan, PLM (cProjects), Content Servers and more).

There are, as with every database, "performance problems" in special areas but generally our response times are below 500 ms on the main ERP.

One drawback of the MaxDB is the fact, that it does not use UTF-8/CESU-8 to store the data (yet) so if you use only single byte codepages in a Unicode system, you will neverless consume the full 2-byte space per character.

Basically I think that you can run roughly 98 % of the current systems on MaxDB without any impacts.

Markus

[LeonardoAraujo · Accepted solution]

Thanks Markus, awesome reply. Thanks

When I mentioned "major" functionalities missing in maxDB in comparison to Oracle, I was referring to functionalities that we'd expect from a DB, but based on your second question answer, you've addressed it; you have several successful reference stories with your ton of servers running it. It is certainly reassuring.

Thanks

Hope to see you in Vegas.

Leonardo

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> When I mentioned "major" functionalities missing in maxDB in comparison to Oracle, I was referring to functionalities that we'd expect from a DB

What are your expectations?

There is no "RAC for MaxDB" (or likewise functionality), there's also nothing like "index/table compression" in an Oracle comparable way but depending on your environment this may or may not be needed.

> , but based on your second question answer, you've addressed it; you have several successful reference stories with your ton of servers running it. It is certainly reassuring.

If you consider this then you should book a "MaxDB Migration service" (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/maxdb?rid=/library/uuid/3c48165c-0e01-0010-6f85-b941b28964bd), they have tools and utilities to check what needs to be done on your system, if you need e. g. secondary indexes on certain tables and also recommend parameter settings.

> Hope to see you in Vegas.

Germany here, not in the US...

Markus

[LeonardoAraujo · Accepted solution]

Great, thanks.

I will take a look at the migration Article you gave me. Thanks a lot!

That brings me to a second question I have: For this eventual migration, we need an experience and certified resource to do that. We are open to remote work. Would you recommend anyone? If so, please feel free to contact me at leonardo at beyondtechnologies dot ca .

It is a migration from Informix to maxDB.

As for Vegas/Berlin, sorry to hear you are not coming to Vegas too. There is a very small chance I get to go to Berlin as well, if so, I will let you know.

Cheers

Leo

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

> That brings me to a second question I have: For this eventual migration, we need an experience and certified resource to do that. We are open to remote work. Would you recommend anyone? If so, please feel free to contact me at leonardo at beyondtechnologies dot ca .

If you book that service you'll get a certified consultant who is able to do that migration, maybe even from Germany

> It is a migration from Informix to maxDB.

Wow - Informix... VERY long ago since I entered the last "oninit -ky"

Markus