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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