Re: mySQL and slow performance - try MaxDB!

[Ulf Wendel]

Hello Rob,

thanks for your report on MaxDB !

Though MaxDB has a long history and some people it has not been improved since the old days, this is not true. MaxDB has been constantly improved over the years and major changes have been made since SAP took over the development of the database. MaxDB is a competitve product. I'm a MaxDB support manager and my personal background is a MySQL background. I was very sceptical about MaxDB at the beginning but I must say it's an alternative! MaxDB has very strong aspects, like the shadow paging mechanism that's the basis for easy backup, (cold-)standby and snapshots, no need for any reorganisation (no OPTIMIZE) and it's space efficient B*-trees.

MaxDB is a full-fledged product ready to run heavy-duty applications like SAP R/3. The performance of MaxDB is not bad at all. I recently got feedback from partners saying "wow, it's in line with MySQL!". Another customer has written a benchmark for an application currently developed by his company. In his case MaxDB was the fastest database for his application. It was at least 35% faster than other well known databases.

I fully agree with you that one has to be very, very careful with benchmarks. A missing feature, a bad optimizer strategy choosed due to outdated statistics, an unrecognized buffer overflow or a bug can slow down individual queries dramatically. I've seen such performance dropdowns for MaxDB and for MySQL. This one query does not say anything about the performance of MySQL in general.

Some queries run slower with MaxDB than with MySQL. Some queries are executed faster with MaxDB. Anyway speed is not everything that counts. Uninterrupted, unattended operation and ease of use other other features to consider.

Thanks for reporting your experiences with MaxDB! There's no reason for a long-term MySQL user to look at MaxDB unless he needs one of MaxDB's features that are not yet available in MySQL. Never touch a running system. Those of you still looking for a database should not forget about MaxDB. It's one of MySQL AB's products. All MySQL AB's products are cool, aren't they?

Best regards,
Ulf