ADABAS (an acronym for Adaptable DAta BAse System) is Software AG’s primary database management system.
First released in 1970, Adabas is considered by some to have been one of the earliest commercially available database products. Initially released on IBM mainframe systems using DOS/360, OS/MFT or OS/MVT, Adabas is now available on a range of other systems including OpenVMS, Unix (including Linux and Linux on zSeries), and Microsoft Windows servers.
Adabas is an inverted list database which allows for the storage of denormalised data as it supports the concept of periodic groups and multi-value fields within a record.
Adabas has maintained its position as one of the world's fastest OLTP databases, offering 24x7 functioning, Parallel Sysplex support, real-time replication capability, SQL and XML access and other capabilities.
Historically, Adabas was used in conjunction with Software AG's programming language Natural adabas-natural, so that many legacy applications that use Adabas as a database on the back-end are also developed with Natural as well.
In 2017, SoftwareAG announced their intention to support both Adabas and Natural to 2050 and beyond.
Source: Wikipedia (ADABAS)
