Hi Keith, I've been using Firebird and the JayBird JCA-JDBC driver and JSP. Firebird is open source and a complete SQL 92 DB. It was spawned from Borland's Interbase 6.0 when it went open source, so it's commercial quality. Interbase has been around for nearly 20 years as a commercial product, so it is rock solid.
Firebird is on SourceForge. The web site for the outfit that does most of the Firebird development is: www.ibphoenix.com. They have a list of Fortune 500 companies using it on the web site and a list of sites you can browse to see it powering web sites. Support contracts are available if that's important to you or your management. There are a number of commercial sites listed offering hosting if you want somebody else to run your web apps and Firebird database for you. It's very stable. I've been running it for a couple of years on a Sun server without a crash or lockup. I've never had the database become corrupted even when some bonehead forgot to shut down the database before killing the machine. Firebird comes with a nice watchdog process that monitors the DB. If the DB process dies for any reason other than a normal shutdown the watchdog restarts it. I've intentionally killed the DB process multiple times to simulate a failure and the watchdog always restarted it with no loss of data. A Tomcat session doesn't like that very much because it links to the database for user authorization and Tomcat doesn't recover when the DB restarts. I've been meaning to write a script that monitors the Firebird process ID for a change, then restarts Tomcat but I've never bothered because Firebird never dies. Mind you, this is on a Solaris server so you may not be so lucky on other OS's. You can also shadow the database, i.e. run two copies of the database file simultaneously on two different disk drives. If one drive dies, the DB continues to run on the remaining drive. It supports stored procedures, blobs, clobs, auto-incrementing keys, security roles, etc., etc. Borland subsequently decided to make Interbase 6.5 un-open source, so Firebird and Interbase have begun to diverge, but most tools still work for both. There are 5 or 6 decent database creation/administration apps available. Most are freebies, a few commercial. You can run the backup/restore utilities in these programs to migrate the DB files between OS's. For example, you can run a backup utility on Windows to read a DB file over the net on a Sun Solaris server, then restore to a Windows server and subsequently run the database file on a Windows system. The JCA-JDBC driver (JayBird) features internal connection pooling, which is nice for standalone apps, or if you can't figure out DBCP :-). It can be used with JBoss or other J2EE containers if you use the JCA-JDBC driver. The DB is written in C++, so it's fast. It's available precompiled for most platforms including: Linux, Windows, Solaris (sparc and X86), FreeBSD, Mac OS X, HP/UX 10 and 11, and now WinCE. Installation is a snap compared to Oracle. There are 64 bit versions for Solaris and Linux in case you nead REALLY big databases. I've used Firebird and the JCA-JDBC driver with DreamWeaver UltraDev to knock out quickie web apps with SQL database access in a few hours without writing a line of code. The driver works with most tools that accept external JDBC drivers. There are active newsgroups to support the DB and the JCA-JDBC driver. The developers monitor these so the info is very good. Rick > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Keith Pemberton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 4:39 AM > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: So what database and script language do you use? > > > > > > Hi everyone... > > > > I have been trying to use MySQL and JSP,Servlets to interact with > > my tomcat server. So far I have had a lot of frustration and little > > luck. Anyway, I was just wonder what the majority of ppl are using as a > > database and scripting language. Your input is much appreciated! > > > > Keith -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
