(no subject)

[Erik Price]

Off the top of my head, a couple of thoughts:


On Mar 16, 2004, at 2:02 PM, Ted Roche wrote:

> - mySQL - fast with ISAM, transactional, no stored procedures

Note that some features (foreign key constraints, tx?) are only 
available if you use InnoDB/Berkeley table format (I forget, sorry), in 
which case you can lose other conveniences like full-text searching and 
the speed of MyISAM.  Overall a very user-friendly database, though, 
and practically wedded to PHP, if that's your application delivery 
framework.

> - PostgreSQL

After using only MySQL for a year, I ended up liking this database 
better than MySQL simply because it offered some extra features that 
MySQL didn't (although MySQL will probably offer them within a year or 
two), but the community is a little smaller, and last I checked (last 
summer) their site/documentation was unusably slow.  You can find 
mirrors hosted at other companies/institutions, though.  The mailing 
list interface is also very complicated, unlike a lot of other open 
source mailing lists (such as the Apache lists or this one), so if you 
like to sub a couple postgres mailing lists, you're in for a treat.

Another plus about Postgres is that it's a true OSS project.  I don't 
mean to slam MySQL, but there's been an awful lot of questionable buzz 
about MySQL's licensing changes lately (such as "client libraries are 
GPL'd unless you want to pay for a non-GPL version").  I don't -think- 
it'd be a problem if you're using PHP for application delivery (because 
MySQL makes a lot of concessions to PHP [including a rumor that their 
stored procedure language scheduled for release 5.0 will use PHP 
syntax]), but the company is finally leveraging its investment in 
developing an open source database.  So, on the one hand, MySQL has 
looming licensing concerns but also the benefit of both open-source 
development and company support, so it might be attractive to a PHB.  
Whereas Postgres is wholly open source, client libraries are open 
source but not GPL, but there's no company standing behind the project 
either AFAIK.  (Though there are companies that will sell support for 
it.)

Postgres's open source JDBC driver is excellent, IME.

> - Firebird
> - Adabase
> - others?
>
> I'm hoping to provide cross-platform access: Windows via ODBC, Mac OS 
> X and
> Linux via libraries or JDBC.

There's another open source database called HSQLDB (formerly HyperSonic 
SQL).  I have no idea how well it performs under load, but its 
advantages are that it's very lightweight, and b/c it's written in Java 
you can just run it after unpacking the zip (no installation needed).  
And of course, runs identically on any platform with a reasonable JVM.  
It's widely-used as a default database in open source J2EE frameworks 
(I think it is the default back-end for JBoss CMP), so there's a lot of 
connectivity if you're using J2EE, but it's not one of the big playas 
you hear about in OSS database conversations, so maybe there's a good 
reason for that.



Erik


-- 
Erik Price

<http://erikprice.com/>