Hi, I don't want to promote any particular database - certainly Oracle is on the high ground. That being said, I caught the first half of the Open Systems Forum yesterday. MySQL themselves presented, but also CommSecure, a local system integrator that uses open source platforms exclusivley. Both HSBC and St. George were mentioned as users of the CommSecure payments and trading solutions. They have used MySQL in the past but now normally deploy with PostgresSQL.
I also know that HP has being heavily promoting it's relationship with Sabre Holdings (they have the lion's share of travel bookings) and they use MySQL on the backend to do process millions of transactions a day. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001864.html http://www.hplinuxroadshow.com/index.php?site=expect&company=mysql BTW If you watch the video and hear a strine accent from the Sabre guy you'd be right. Alan is from just south of Campbelltown (we came 2nd and 3rd in 4 Unit maths at our high school) and is now one the Sabre VPs! So I guess there are at least some companies willing to bet their bottom line on the open source databases! Martin Martin Visser, CISSP Network and Security Consultant Consulting & Integration Technology Solutions Group - HP Services 410 Concord Road Rhodes NSW 2138 Australia Mobile: +61-411-254-513 Fax: +61-2-9022-1800 E-mail: martin.visserAThp.com This email (including any attachments) is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above and may contain information that is confidential, proprietary or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify HP immediately by return email and then delete the email, destroy any printed copy and do not disclose or use the information in it. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jamie Honan Sent: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 9:18 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [SLUG] Pros & Cons of Unix databases 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 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
