MySQL vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise comparison

Oracle and SAP are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Oracle is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.3, while SAP is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.5. Oracle holds a 6.2% mindshare in SQL, compared to SAP’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Oracle users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of SAP users who would recommend it.

MySQL

Read 152 MySQL reviews

14,487 Views
7,244 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Read 14 SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise reviews

1,726 Views
1,640 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

MySQL

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise and MySQL are both competitive database systems within the database solutions market. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise holds an advantage in scalability and high-performance analytics, crucial for large-scale enterprise applications. MySQL, with its open-source nature and adaptability, stands out due to community-driven enhancements, offering a cost-effective solution that appeals to many businesses.

Features: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise excels with advanced analytics, high availability, and robust security. It is tailored for large businesses that demand reliable and scalable solutions. MySQL provides extensive open-source adaptability, cross-platform availability, and straightforward web integration, making it a versatile choice. It supports various programming languages, enhancing its flexibility.

Room for Improvement: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise can enhance its feature set to match recent industry improvements, integrate more modern cloud features, and improve ease of learning for new users. MySQL could improve scaling capabilities for extremely large data sets, enhance native graphical user interfaces for better user experience, and improve out-of-the-box enterprise-level support options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise provides robust technical support with a comprehensive deployment model suitable for complex enterprise environments. MySQL offers a streamlined deployment process ideal for smaller businesses and web applications, although customer service frequently relies on community support instead of professional assistance.

Pricing and ROI: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise typically involves high initial costs, but it promises a significant ROI in environments that require exceptional scalability and reliability. MySQL's open-source model considerably lowers setup costs, delivering a quick ROI especially beneficial for small to medium-sized businesses looking for economical database solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed MySQL vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

MySQL vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

June 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

MySQL

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

152

Ranking in other categories

Open Source Databases (1st)

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

20th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of MySQL is 6.2%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is 1.4%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
MySQL	6.2%
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise	1.4%
Other	92.4%

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Varuns Ug

Senior Software Developer at NIT

Reliable transactions have supported secure payments, refunds, and bookings at high volumes

Regarding MySQL improvements, a pain point is horizontal scalability. MySQL scales very well vertically and can support read replicas, but as a system grows significantly, sharding and distributed data management can become complex compared to databases that are designed to scale horizontally from the beginning. This is one of the areas where I think MySQL should work more. Another area is handling very large analytic workloads. MySQL is excellent for transactional systems, but for large-scale analytics or reporting, specialized analytic databases may sometimes be a better fit. Apart from that, one area is performance troubleshooting. As the database grows, diagnosing things such as slow queries, lock contention, and deadlocks becomes complex.

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reviewer2784705

Senior Advisor at a government with 10,001+ employees

Long term database experience has supported OLTP workloads and delivers reliable cross platform migrations

SAP is not putting money into modernizing SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. One of the things I discovered on the last project I was on was that they did not incorporate the Intel new instruction set in SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. Intel has augmented its instruction set referred to as new instructions. They did that to make conversion easier. When you migrate SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise cross-platform, you go through a process where it converts the character set. If you are going from AIX to Linux or from Solaris to Linux, Linux is referred to as Little Endian, while AIX or Solaris are considered Big Endian. This is determined by how the product stores data. The word size of these processors is 32 bits long. If you start numbering from the little end, it is referred to as Little Endian. If you start numbering from the big end, it is called Big Endian. To migrate a SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise database from a Big Endian setup like AIX or Solaris to migrate to a Big Endian setup on an Intel, the operating system determines whether it is Little Endian or Big Endian. When you migrate from Big Endian to Little Endian, the database has to go through a character set conversion, and some of these databases are quite large with gigabytes and gigabytes of data. They have to do a character set conversion to the existing database before they do anything else. The worst part is that you have to rebuild all the indexes when you do that. When you switch endianness of the database, you have to rebuild all the indexes. It will automatically do that for system tables, but for actual user databases, you have to rebuild all your indexes, and it takes a long time. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is a relational database and is the predecessor of Microsoft SQL Server. All that functionality that Microsoft SQL Server had came from essentially SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. The problem with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise these days is it is not expanding its place in the marketplace or expanding its position in the marketplace. A lot of companies have migrated away from SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. It works fairly well, but the problem is SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise was architected to be an OLTP engine and is now doing things for larger databases that were not in its original intended purpose. The endianness of the RDBMS is a major impediment to continuing to use SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. You have a multi-gigabyte database, and it will go through a conversion process in a single-threaded fashion, and then you have to rebuild the indexes. Rebuilding the indexes is lengthy and time-consuming. The part of the conversion process that is concerned with conversion of the character set is single-threaded. You may have eight cores on your machine or virtual machine and only one can be used in the conversion process. There is another problem with the whole thing in that it will sometimes not operate properly. Under certain workloads, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise will become overwhelmed. When you convert it, it does not operate properly in all circumstances. The root cause of that is that SAP in its desire to save money and desire to orphan the product has not recompiled or redeveloped the product to take advantage of the Intel new instruction set. Other relational databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server have the same issue to deal with, but with those platforms, they are taking advantage of the new instruction set. There are some additional Intel instruction sets or instructions in their Intel instruction set. With SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, they did not bother to incorporate support for the new instruction set instructions. In certain circumstances, the database does not operate properly. It is unable to do what it needs to do. If you do your research and go on the internet and see what happens with Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, what comes back is that it takes 4% longer to perform a lot of the instructions. When you are using the new instruction set, it adds 4% to the runtime of the database.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The deployment process is pretty fast."

"Mysql is free : it's an open source project, so you can use it with no cost."

"You can easily build data models both on-premise and on the cloud."

"The API's to PHP, ruby, perl, java, python, and many more high level programming languages makes it easy for us to deploy new features fast."

"I would absolutely recommend this solution to others."

"MySQL is an open-source product and has good community support. If you encounter any problem, you can easily ask other members of the community to help. They help you a lot. On top of being free, MySQL is a cross-platform database, meaning it can work on both Windows and Linux. It is very good for us."

"The most valuable feature is the fact that the product is cross-platform, because it reduces server TCO, for my small company."

"I like the simplistic view of MySQL to build custom queries and things like that as compared to SQL Server, which seems more cluttered. SQL Server has a query analyzer. MySQL pretty much does the same, and performance-wise, it has less overhead for connecting to our ERP system. It seems more responsive and cleaner. With MySQL, you get what you need without any overbloating, for which Microsoft is known. That's why they have so many constant security patches for everything because there is so much stuff, which degrades performance."

More MySQL pros

"I like that SAP ASE can match code and the database index to index data in the programming language."

"The financials is the most valuable feature for us in operational terms because we deal with a lot of services and SAP has integrated everything for us, both financial reporting and operations."

"In SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, there are some built-in stored procedures that you can use to fire those commands and get the data in a very systematic manner where you can see the results."

"SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise was basically as good as its rivals in my experience."

"This is a wonderful database that is, in my opinion, underrated. Users are able to get the most out of my experience by taking advantage of its centralized environment."

"Sufficient, robust, power DB."

"This product has my complete confidence."

"Provides very good integration."

More SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise pros

Cons

"The availability of tools could be improved in the MySQL open-source platform. They can provide more analytical tools. I haven't had any particularly difficult issues to troubleshoot on MySQL, but in the past, on Microsoft SQL Server, I had to troubleshoot some difficult issues, and better tools were in place to see what was going on in real-time on the server. So, that's the bit that is lacking on the MySQL open-source platform."

"Some problems with big table operations, and a struggle to keep the servers responding in peak situations."

"We face certain integration issues, especially when we integrate the database with security solutions like IBM QRadar, which affects database performance."

"When it comes to stability SQL Server is better than MySQL. This is an area they could improve."

"MySQL lacks a feature akin to Oracle's Real Application Clusters, which ensures continuous database availability within the same data center or nearby data centers."

"Beware that if you don’t follow these instructions step-by-step, your server may not restart or rather it will start with InnoDB storage engine disabled and an error in the logs."

"The solution is expensive."

"I am looking for the Temporal SQL feature, which basically means that there is complete history for each table."

More MySQL cons

"Because the solution is customized. we do occasionally face unique bugs. There are always some changes that need to be made here and there."

"SAP should refine its debugging method, and the process needs to be a little faster."

"There is lack of good support in Mexico - I would prefer Oracle or IBM over SAP in terms of support."

"The overall performance of the product is an area where the tool has certain shortcomings and needs to improve."

"I think that the solution needs to be positioned better within the market as it appears as though the Adaptive Server is being left out of the SAP scope."

"In my opinion, product support is not that great from SAP because they have already declared the end-of-date for SAP ASE. They will be stopping product support."

"SAP should refine its debugging method, and the process needs to be a little faster. It should use more Pragmas and fewer pseudocomments. I would like if SAP added more features based on advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and voice control. The modularization and if-else techniques could also incorporate the latest technology to code and solve complex problems. The SAP Editor should be more elaborative, and it should allow many more types of statements for all uses."

"User interface could be more user friendly."

More SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the licensed version of MySQL."

"The pricing falls within the moderate range."

"It is open source. We prefer it for POCs because it saves the license cost."

"The solution’s pricing depends on customer requirements. A license is not required for the community edition."

"Microsoft licensing for SQL Server is probably ten times more expensive. I used to work for the government, and I remember when we were looking into upgrading to the enterprise version of SQL Server 2019, the licensing was going to cost 350,000. To get the equivalent in the cloud, it was going to be about four grand to get the same processing power and everything else. With MySQL, it was going to be about 300 for the same licensing. Cost-wise, for sure, there is a huge difference. Would you prefer to pay 300 a month or 3,000 to have the same amount of data resources? You might lose a few options that you need, but it isn't worth the price difference."

"This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge."

"We're using the open-source version right now, which is free. I do see some value in some of the more enterprise functions. We're using the open-source version right now, and I was interested in the MySQL Enterprise version really for the tools that they provide, but we decided not to make the purchase."

"There is no licensing fee."

More MySQL pricing and cost advice

"I rate SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise's pricing a six out of ten."

"The licensing cost for ASE is pretty low."

"Price-wise, the product is worth it since one needs very less infrastructure to use it."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Comms Service Provider

Construction Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	74
Midsize Enterprise	34
Large Enterprise	63

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

Why are MySQL connections encrypted and what is the biggest benefit of this?

MySQL encrypts connections to protect your data and the biggest benefit from this is that nobody can corrupt it. If you move information over a network without encryption, you are endangering it, m...

See all answers

Considering that there is a free version of MySQL, would you invest in one of the paid editions?

I may be considered a MySQL veteran since I have been using it since before Oracle bought it and created paid versions. So back in my day, it was all free, it was open-source and the best among sim...

See all answers

What is one thing you would improve with MySQL?

One thing I would improve related to MySQL is not within the product itself, but with the guides to it. Before, when it was free, everyone was on their own, seeking tutorials and how-to videos onli...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?

From a pricing perspective, I would say the solution is fairly priced. In Oracle, you have two or three databases at most on one machine. In SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, one machine can have mul...

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What needs improvement with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?

I have worked with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise IQ, and Replication Server. I also worked with SQL Anywhere at one point. SAP acquired Sybase at one point, and the...

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Comparisons

Firebird SQL vs MySQL

Compared 17% of the time

PostgreSQL vs MySQL

Compared 6% of the time

MariaDB vs MySQL

Compared 6% of the time

SQL Server vs MySQL

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Database vs MySQL

Compared 5% of the time

More MySQL Competitors

SAP IQ vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 19% of the time

SAP HANA vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Database vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 10% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 9% of the time

Teradata vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 4% of the time

More SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

MySQL

June 2026

Download MySQL product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

June 2026

Download SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP ASE

Overview

MySQL is an open-source database known for its ease of use and high performance. It offers features like replication and clustering, making it ideal for diverse applications. Its cost-effectiveness and LAMP integration are key advantages for businesses.

MySQL supports a variety of languages and platforms, providing reliable, scalable data management. Its graphical interface and LAMP architecture integration enhance its usability, while community support further strengthens its appeal. Challenges include scalability issues with large databases, lack of advanced clustering, and limited high-availability features. Complex queries may affect performance, and integration can pose difficulties. The outdated interface and insufficient documentation are also concerns, along with replication and backup reliability issues.

What are MySQL's key features?

Open-source nature: Freely available and customizable.
Cross-platform compatibility: Supports multiple operating systems.
Scalability: Capable of handling large volumes of data.
Replication and clustering: Ensure data redundancy and load balancing.
Full-text search: Provides powerful search capabilities.
LAMP integration: Seamlessly integrates with Linux, Apache, and PHP.

What benefits should users consider?

Cost-effectiveness: Reduces expenses due to its open-source nature.
High performance: Efficiently processes large volumes of data.
Active community support: Access to a wide range of resources and expertise.
Versatile use cases: Suitable for varied applications including web development and IoT.

MySQL is widely implemented in industries such as web development, e-commerce, and finance. It's used for managing dynamic websites, powering e-commerce platforms, and supporting financial applications. Its compatibility with PHP and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for CMS platforms like WordPress. With cloud services integration, MySQL is a backend choice for scalable applications in various sectors.

Oracle

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise delivers customizable operations and reliable OLTP features crucial for banking, being resource-efficient and SQL-capable while maintaining high security and performance standards, though updates and cross-platform conversion can be challenging.

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is tailored for environments needing secure, efficient data handling. Its OLTP capabilities make it a top choice for banking and finance by ensuring smooth transactions. While the database supports multiple data types and cloud integration, it is essential to address the need for user-friendly interfaces and better synchronization features. Although its transaction management isn't as competitive compared to Oracle and PostgreSQL, its SQL capabilities and security tools remain highly regarded. Users primarily utilize it for data storage, scripting, and operational management across development environments, including banking, enabling effective data manipulation and storage.

What are the standout features of SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?

Customizable Operations: Tailored configurations for diverse business needs.
Strong OLTP Features: Efficient and swift transaction processing.
SQL Capabilities: Robust tools for SQL programming and querying.
Financial Integration: Seamlessly handles financial data and transactions.
Cloud Integration: Supports integration with cloud-based storage and services.

What benefits should users look for when evaluating SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?

Cost Efficiency: Requires minimal resources for effective performance.
User-friendliness: Easy learning curve for new users and developers.
High Security: Strong measures to protect sensitive data.
Efficient Transaction Handling: Smooth management of complex transactions.
Reliability: Consistent performance with minimal downtime.

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is widely implemented in banking, dealing with efficient data manipulation and storing historical data crucial for operations. It is leveraged for both financial and operational management tasks, including planning and logistics. The database's robust features extend benefits to industries requiring rigorous data management, such as development, testing, and production environments connected across banking networks, focusing on main data handling and replication tasks.

SAP

Sample Customers

Facebook, Tumblr, Scholastic, MTV Networks, Wikipedia, Verizon Wireless, Sage Group, Glassfish Open Message Queue, and RightNow Technologies.

City of Buenos Aires, ASR Group, Citrix, EarlySense, Usha International Limited, Automotive Resources International (ARI), Takisada-Osaka Co. Ltd., Coelba (Grupo Neoenergia), RZD Russian Railways, National Basketball Association - NBA, TALLY

Buyer's Guide

MySQL vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

June 2026

Free Report: MySQL vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

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