SAP has it's beta Version of MaxDB 7.6 available for download.

some changes and improvements:

• Schemas replace user/user-group feature
• Functions LENGTH and SUBSTR for LOBs
• User-defined functions
• new Statement INSERT...WITH COMMIT
• New option FULL for log backup commands
• Log backup checks
• System triggers
• Online-changeable database parameters
• Parallel log queues
• Operator-based join implemented

With MaxDB version 7.6, the precompiler is not delivered any more, SAP points Application developers to use the SQLDBC (native), JDBC or ODBC interface of MaxDB.

The Management tool Web DBM was frozen and delivered as is due to the development of a Java-/Eclipse-based and therefore platform-independent Database Manager. I wonder when Oracle goes into that direction with their Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The SQL Studio/Web SQL Studio has a new Synchronization Manager which is a tool for synchronizing the table contents of two or more MaxDB instances or transporting data into a MySQL Database Server. It will be part of the software package at the general availability of MaxDB 7.6… I am not sure how this relates with the MySQL replication features and if you could use it for MySql to MySQL transportation as well.

you can also see the detailed description of the above features or simply download it