(no subject)

[Ted Roche]

Thanks, Eric. That's pretty much what I've gathered so far. I've used MySQL
on a few test projects in-house and it is easy to use, well-documented and
has a pretty rich 3rd party community. However, when I started looking at
it, it looked like it was "free to play around in, free to develop" and $375
to deploy. "Conventional wisdom" was that once a developer owned a license,
he/she could deploy many solutions. Now, the MySQL web site seems to be
tightening up on the definition, requiring a commercial license *per CPU* at
the still-reasonable price of $495. And if the client wants to deploy it on
a 4-CPU box, well, we're starting to talk real money. 

I'm not opposed to people making money from their software (that's what I
do), but I want some certainty in the licensing and predictable future
costs, as well. 

Besides, it's the "M" in LAMP. Who wants to deliver a LAPP solution? (okay,
you guys in the peanut gallery, quiet down!)

PostgreSQL looks promising. Guess I'll focus some R&D there... Thanks again!

-----Original Message-----
From: gnhlug-discuss-admin at mail.gnhlug.org
[mailto:gnhlug-discuss-admin at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Erik Price
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 8:39 AM
To: tedroche at tedroche.com
Cc: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
Subject: Re: (no subject)


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/>

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