Wikipedia has a fairly extensive feature comparison table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_database_management_systems
I know you're looking for unbiased/objective facts, but as someone who at one point made a decision to go with Oracle, I'll advise you to run far away from it. It is a decision you'll regret in the long term. It's insanely expensive for anything but the most trivial installation, it's a resource hog (which contributes to its cost), and their "support" has to be some of the worst in *any* industry (especially given the exorbitant per annum fee for it). It took 11 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to rectify that error in my judgement (which ended in a conversion to PostgreSQL, BTW). Everything Peter said about MySQL is true. While I don't think MySQL technically is a bad choice (depending on your needs), the Oracle/Sun merger has put such a big question mark on it that, as a system architect, I wouldn't dare risk selecting it for any new project. I fully expect MySQL as a project to be dead within 2 years -- either borged into an Oracle marketing vehicle or simply abandoned entirely. MariaDB and Drizzle are the heirs apparent to MySQL in the open-source arena. PostgreSQL is pretty much in lock-step with Oracle feature-wise, but without the cost or the baggage. It gets significantly better with each release (not that it needs improvement), and the community support is phenomenal. You really can't go wrong with choosing it. -- Stephen Clouse <[email protected]>
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