SAP MaxDB is the database management system developed and supported by SAP AG. It has its focus on the requirements of SAP customers and SAP applications and can be used as a less expensive alternative to databases from other vendors for your own or third-party applications as well. It is a competitive database management system for medium to large server configurations and also a convincing offering for a desktop or laptop database management system, as SAP MaxDB is very easy to install (see SAP MaxDB Installation on Windows and Linux) and operate (see Getting Started with SAP MaxDB.)
The key benefits of SAP MaxDB are its many built-in self-administering features. SAP MaxDB is available for the most prominent operating system/hardware platforms Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Unix.
Today, about 15,000 SAP customer installations run on SAP MaxDB and SAP liveCache technology proving SAP MaxDB's reliability, scalability and availability for configurations of all sizes. SAP MaxDB is also widely used within SAP, for example for the Service Marketplace, the documentation development in Knowledge Warehouse, and also SDN runs on SAP MaxDB. SDN currently is one of the largest SAP NetWeaver Portal implementation with far more than 1,000,000 named users, and it runs on SAP MaxDB and Linux-x64.
SAP liveCache technology is an object-based enhancement of the SAP MaxDB database system and was developed to manage complex objects (e.g. in logistic solutions like SAP SCM/APO).
For solutions of this type, large volumes of data must be permanently available. Unlike SAP MaxDB, a SAP liveCache instance keeps all data that the system needs to access in memory. It provides data structures and methods for high speed processing of networks, as for example Available-to-Promise (ATP) and Production-Planning-and-Control (PPS).
SAP liveCache is patented SAP technology. It can only be used with SAP applications.
For more information, see SAP MaxDB Solution Brief and SAP MaxDB Solution in Detail.