John,

Most of the recommendations you'll get for open source db's will be
either MySQL or PostgreSQL.  Traditionally MySQL was considered to be
more user friendly but also lighter weight in terms of advanced DBMS
features and PostgreSQL had more advanced features, but carried a higher
learning curve.  These two systems are moving closer and closer together
with MySQL adding more and more of the advanced features that PostgreSQL
has, and the PostgreSQL community adding a lot more of the GUIs, Windows
support and other bells and whistles that made MySQL easy to use.  I
guessing that if you don't know either system, and don't have your needs
so clearly defined that you eliminate one system or the other based on
their limited differences, that you could pretty much just flip a coin,
and choose one of those two at random and you'll find that you end up
making the right choice.  They are both great DBMSs.

Barry

P.S.  I primarily use PostgreSQL

-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan L. Walls [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2005 6:26 PM
To: John Armstrong
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [cgiapp] What's the best "free" DB for a web-based app?

John;

I'll let you cc: the DBI group if you like, i've just included the  
cgi-app folks.

It's kind of hard to make a recommendation since there's not a lot of  
detail about your needs.

That said, _I_ like MySQL and it has quite a few options for storage  
engines, replication and, as of 5.0, views. I've also used Postgres  
at work, but my company's moved away from it because replication with  
it isn't as straightforward. That's _our_ need. Josh Danzinger and  
Dan Horne, in separate emails pointed out SQLite.

Really, the key question is, what sort of application are you  
building? The immediate other question is, what resources are  
available to you? Other questions stem from that :)

Cheers,

Nathan

On Nov 29, 2005, at 8:02 PM, John Armstrong wrote:

>
> Hi - I'm soon to be doing a Perl app on the Internet, that'll need
> database. We want the db to be as "free" as possible, but still fully
> multi-user (web-based). Would the best route be MySql on Linux? Random
> access files? Something else? We want no licensing obligations (no  
> Oracle,
> Sequal Server, etc.). We want to go with Perl because it's the best
> programming language invented by humans.
>
>
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