On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 11:20:22AM +1000, Peter Chubb wrote: > >>>>> "Howard" == Howard Lowndes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Howard> Can anyone provide pointers to good reading material on the > Howard> comparisons between the various Unix databases.
Peter Chubb: > I'm interested in this too. The general impression I get from `real' > users is that Oracle is the only choice for a serious database app at > the moment. Personally, I'd prefer to use an open-source engine; but > then you have Postgres as the only serious contender. Msql and mysql, > SQlite, grokbase, etc., are fairly limited (although reasonably fast for > small-scale use). At least, that's my impression. For very large sites, expensive if things go wrong, I've seen Oracle and several years ago, Informix used. Informix especially on SCO. Mysql would have been out of the question years ago, with no support for transactions. Now, I'm not so sure. The impression I get with Oracle is that it is safe bet, and risk aversion is one of the priorities for many people. The major thing that a database is used for, especially in web apps. is concurrancy control. This is a huge issue with the numbers of users and numbers of hits that large sites have. This document, I think, gives a pretty good roundup of the kinds of sites that have grown up. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/Service%20Architectures.doc (Unfortunately the graphics don't scale properly in OpenOffice, but they are very worthwhile.) I hope to base some of my talk on Apache2, large sites and concurrancy on some of it. The author makes the point that everyone starts off treating the db as a 'blackbox' sql engine, with interfaces such as perl dbi, but before long starts to integrate more and more into things like PL/SQL and embedding special constructs in their application code. That's been my experience too. However, I despair of SQL databases. They don't have rich expressions, their performance is hopeless. Many a warehouse, accounting and invoicing systems are still run on Pick/Universe. As for small scale use, I think databases are often used when they shouldn't be. The filesystem is a pretty good database too, Just my 2c. Jamie -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
