A consultant did a project for us and chose MySQL. We thought it was cool that MySQL was free.
Turns out, MySQL costs over $500 (USD) if you are a commercial organization like us! Even worse, we have to formally transfer licenses to customers and any further transfers must include involvement of the MySQL organization. Since we are a reputable organization, we diligently track the license numbers- I make my mfg group log them, print them and include them in the BOM of systems we ship. Occassionally, I audit them to make sure we are staying legal. I spent many hours studying the MySQL license agreements, I found ambiguitites and questions and called their rep several times. As usual, licenses punish the honest people. What a PITA. The cost for us to do that work and tracking is hard to measure but is certainly not free. This prompted me to look around and find another open source database that did not go over to the dark side and turn greedy. Since Postgres has true foreign key integrity enforcement and truly has a reputation for being hardened and robust, it got our attention. We are pretty close to choosing PostgreSQL 8.x. Since we know and use only Windows, there's still some learning curve and pain we are going through. Fortunately, there is a simple installer for windows. The PGAdmin tool that comes with PG looks decent and a company named EMS makes a decent looking tool for about $195. Trouble is, we are not DB admins. We're programmers who love and know java, JDBC and a few other languages. So, our problem in installing is we don't know a cluster or SSL from a hole in the ground. Things get confusing about contexts- are we talking about a user of the system or the database? Yikes, do I need to write down the 30+ character autogenerated password? We just want to use JDBC, code SQL queries and essentially not care what database is under us. We would love to find a good tool that runs as an Eclipse plug-in that lets us define our database, generate a script file to create it and perhaps also help us concoct queries. Our experience is that the many UNIX-ish thing about postgres are there and we don't know UNIX. This makes you realize how much you take for granted about the OS you do know. Of course, we'll learn, but postgres people, if you're listening: good job, now take us a little farther and we will be your most ardent supporters. ==Bill== -- Bill Ewing ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Posted via http://www.codecomments.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend