Making Translytical Applications Reactive: Lessons Learned Implementing an R2DBC Driver for SAP HANA

Abstract: As the popularity of reactive programming increases, database vendors need to think about how to best enable reactive applications running on top of relational databases. The technical implementation is one part of this decision. However, other issues, such as deciding whether to provide the code as open source or closed source must also be considered. In this talk, we’ll give an overview of the lessons learned while implementing a reactive relational database connectivity (R2DBC) driver for the SAP HANA database. We’ll touch upon the challenges and pitfalls that we encountered as well as the general considerations we made during the process. We’ll also share the reasons behind the decision for implementing an R2DBC driver, and present the current status and roadmap. We intend this talk to be useful for software engineers who want to build or contribute to an R2DBC driver, as well as for software engineers interested in using R2DBC in their projects.