Professional uses for MaxDB (Survey?)

Question

All,
I'm trying to decide if I should invest time in getting familiar with MaxDB.
In searching dice.com for example, there were only three matches - statistically insignificant.
So beyond personal enjoyment, or skunk-works IT development (i.e. not used broadly as support to an end-user system), can some of you say how much MaxDB professional activity there is?
Since SAP uses DB2 for its own IT operations, I suspect MaxDB is a balance to over-priced DB's, but not a commercial contender. (Not debating any technical merits).
And I am distinguishing MaxDB as a non-SAP install DB, that is, used as a true development platform.
I would appreciate direct answers, as well as pro/con synopsis.
My hope is that being skilled in MaxDB may be a niche career, but not so niche as to be fruitless.
Thanks to all who respond.
PS. My past includes time as a Oracle DBA/Forms developer, so I'm not worried about my ability to learn MaxDB.

Answer 1

PRedditt wrote:Hi there;
>
> I'm trying to decide if I should invest time in getting familiar with MaxDB.
> In searching dice.com for example, there were only three matches - statistically insignificant.
> So beyond personal enjoyment, or skunk-works IT development (i.e. not used broadly as support to an end-user system), can some of you say how much MaxDB professional activity there is?
Yes, we do, and we have been doing so for half a decade by now, without too many problems. We're a German SME working in the field of dedicated document and drawing management for mid-sized and large construction projects and, so far, are happy to have most of the larger construction companies at least in Germany among our customers. So far, we run something next to 200 significant projects on our system, serving something next to 10 millions of documents with pretty complex metadata structures attached to them, hosting something around 1.5 TB in file data and > 10 GB in a MaxDB database instance. Numbers not that much impressive to a large-site system administrator, I guess, but not bad for a mid-sized company.  
> And I am distinguishing MaxDB as a non-SAP install DB, that is, used as a true development platform.
> I would appreciate direct answers, as well as pro/con synopsis.
Pros:
- Generally, after running it in production throughout these years, I have to say that MaxDB is, technically speaking, a pretty "friendly" platform, easy to get started with, easy to get work done. Install it, create a database instance, read through the documentation (which is rather good) - period. Comparing things to Oracle especially, the learning curve to get acquainted with tools and technologies is way less challenging.
- Tooling, both talking about the "old" (DBMGUI/SQLGUI) and the "new" ones (DBM Studio) is pretty straightforward and usable, and so are the command line tools. Especially important to me is GNU/Linux support on both servers and clients, and, again, here we do not have any trouble running MaxDB on CentOS (server) and dev workstations (Ubuntu).
- Runtime management is a pretty straightforward thing at least in our environment, also talking about things like backup/restore or keeping a "standby" instance which is reasonably up-to-date.
- The MaxDB crowd in this forum, even though not knowing answers to all your problems, generally can be considered pretty kind and helpful.
- Of course, compared to Oracle DBMS, pricing and licensing is an interesting aspect especially running in load situations on "large" machines. It's a straightforward, robust, usable DBMS that just works.
Cons:
- Only technical "con" I can think of: MaxDB generally falls short in terms of support for most of the "newer" development technologies and toolings. Overally, no matter whether talking about JPA 2.0 / EclipseLink, Ruby On Rails, Grails or whatever of these new "buzzwords" you might come up with, I have continuously experienced MaxDB to be way more of a problem to get started with than, in example, Oracle, mySQL or JavaDB (I'm a Java developer so this is my primary environment).
- SAP platform strategy related to "non-SAP" customers doesn't seem all too clear to me honestly. Looking at that, I see MaxDB obviously being developed mainy with the focus of serving as a "batteries included" database for SAP solutions, leaving the "community edition" and its users merely as a "side effect" which is not supported in any way whatsoever. From that point of view, as posted here a couple of times before, sometimes I wished SAP to provide a slim, sane package of licensing+support affordable for small and mid-sized companies... At the moment, the only "commercial grade" support I found is Infolytics in Cologne, Germany, who are, off-heart, extremely good at doing so.
- Compared to, in example, an Oracle 11gR2, the amount of technology that comes with the database itself is way more limited: Looking at things like Oracles Database Filesystem, integrated full text indexing (including things like soundex() / fuzzy searches), the "XMLDB" feature which is pretty neat, the integrated Java runtime (allowing in example the database to directly expose data access components via SOAP / web services) and so on, you might find out that MaxDB functionality is way more limited. If you just want to have a reliable, stable RDBMS, this is something you can merrily forget about. Then again, in some situations it is additional value provided by the database in case of Oracle which might keep you from having to either develop solutions on your own or throw in additional third party stuff i.e. for full-text indexing.
Cheers,
Kristian