I took the time to go over to their site and check things out, and because I have never heared of this database I was a bit surprised when they state that "Adabas is one of the fastest databases in the world"! I'm no oldschool database-guru or something but I would think I had heared of the worlds fastes databases...

Has anybody worked with it, and can tell me something about it? I'm really curious and I would like to hear something from somebody that has a little more objective view of it than Adebas (Software AG) themselves.

I'm sure others can answer better than I. But back in the the 1980s, when I was programming in Natural and in COBOL pgms that ran against an Adabas database, it was said that Adabas was the best (most efficient) DBMS on the market. Almost all serious computing was on mainframes in those days.

BTW: Some guy was caught at some airport with a tape that contained the source code for Adabas, back in those days. He was going to sell it to the Soviets, who were in the black (or should I say "red?") market for it. Software AG used this incident in a magazine advertisement, showing the top Russian leaders, with their fur hats on, on what was probably the traditional May Day reviewing stand, wherein they stood and watched the Soviet military parade. Someone put this ad on the bulletin board where I worked, and someone (else?) wrote on it in pen, "They can have ours for free!" Probably not a well thought out complaint, if the claim is true that Adabas is or was the best database.

BTW2: It looks like the gov't/security/defense sector of the US economy is moving first, ahead of any private sector recovery. My experience with consulting firms and job boards is that things like Adabas and Unysis are in many gov't shops. This includes, BTW, NASA! This is the motivation behind my other post, today.

So it's really an old mainframe database or something? I'm too young to know anything about COBOL and mainframes and such, so maybe this question is just plain stupid...

But as it still says on their website that they are among the fastest databases in the world, I wonder how it does in benchmarking against other databases like MS SQL-server, Oracle, Sybase and all those other more commonly used ones...do you know? I am a sql-server programmer myself and I wonder if its worth to take a closer look at it?

Sorry, I can't answer for how well Adabas ranks in the new millenium! Hopefully someone will answer who knows!

Most of the "oldschool" languages and databases are still in use for a reason: they work. They are the backbones of all these new 4GL, GUI languages and pretty screens. Your web-based and other fluffy interfaces would have a hard time existing without old-school databases. Even DB2 becomes challenged when you are dealing with large amounts of data. The reason why the government and large corporations use these old database systems is because nothing new out there can handle them!

A lot of large companies still use Adabas, I have worked on a number of site still activly developing with Adabas.

Adabas is really a useful software. All the 3 companies that I worked for still use it.