I keep hearing reports that the recent announcement of cooperation between SAP AG and MySQL AB has been making the community unhappy. What’s the deal? I don’t understand what’s not to like here. SAP aren’t giving up development of DBMS technology, they’re just giving up the marketing of it. And what a great injection for MySQL, makers of my favourite open source DB.

IMO making and maintaining DBMS products isn’t one of SAP’s core business drivers. Never was, never should be. SAP’s strengths lie in a combination of building good application code, application development infrastructures, and abstraction layers for underlying common technologies like databases, spool mechanisms, TP monitors (ok this was more an R/2 thing) and so on, so that their application and technology products run on lots of platform / software combinations. SAP rescued ADABAS D (and renamed it SAP DB). I think that was a good move. They’re now sharing the technology and their support to an open source DB vendor with a good name.

As long as the relationship remains open source, what can be seen as bad about the partnership?

Originally published on SAP Community