On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Tom Rauschenbach wrote:
> For a variety of reasons I want a relational database for Linux.
I can relate to that. ;-)
> As far as I know my choices are
> MySQL (which has huge and confusing doc)
> Oracle 8i (which has a huge and confusing download)
> DB2 (which has an advertized download that I can't find)
> Postgress (which appears to have no doc whatsoever).
Database systems generally are large, complex things, and generally that
involves huge, "confusing" documentation. I think that pretty much comes with
the teritory.
There are additional commercial database offerings for Linux. Informix, in
particular, was the first "major" DB company to suport Linux. At the time,
they were one of the only "big" names supporting Linux at all, and I believe
they accelerated Linux quite a bit.
PostgreSQL docs are here:
http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/docs/
> What are you folks using, if anything ?
Text files. ;-) But I'm an admin, not a developer. (In my current job,
anyway.)
> My needs are so modest that I might just do what I need in C and be done
> with it, but I'd like to have a real database engine just because.
I like Perl's DBI system for database development, because you can write
your program once, and plug it into any number of database engines with no
code changes.
> Besides, this seems like a nice discussion topic for this group.
Are you sure you don't want to discuss whether workstation users should be
given the root password instead? ;-)
On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Joshua S. Freeman wrote:
> dangerous waters... people argue over RDMBS's the way people argue over
> vi vs. emacs...
Heh heh. :-)
> btw, fwiw, freshmeat, /. , sourceforge and thinkgeek all use MySQL
As does Slashdot and several other "news" sites.
MySQL sacrifices some functionality (they implement only a subset of the SQL
specification) to get blazing fast speed. If you're a site that has lots of
reads and few updates (e.g., most "news" websites), then MySQL is ideal. If
you're an e-commerce site, where things like transations are vital, MySQL is a
poor choice.
PostgreSQL claims to be one of the best SQL databases available in terms of
implementation of the SQL specification. Whether you care about that or not,
I don't know. PostgreSQL also has a reputation for being slower then some
other products. How much slower, I don't know.
Oracle (and other commercial products) currently have the advantage in terms
of scalability and robustness. You can do things with Oracle you just flat
out can't do with any Open Source DB product. But I don't think you need any
of those sorts of features.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Net Technologies, Inc. <http://www.ntisys.com>
Voice: (800)905-3049 x18 Fax: (978)499-7839
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