Databases - opensource

[Niall Kavanagh]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Roger Day wrote:

> Greetings all
> 
> I am busy defining and specifying a project to build a new website for an
> organisation. Integral to this website will be a database. I would like to
> hear from people what choices they have made wrt databases and if they
> turned out to be good or bad choices. So if anyone has had any experience
> with any of the following, or any others, please let me know.
> 
> MySQL

*Extremely* fast. Poor transaction support (compared to others, YMMV).
Supports limited replication (master->slave) [BETA], supports fulltext
indexing [BETA], which is VERY fast and nice for making a quick and dirty
search engine (I'm actually working on a DejaNews alternative for myself
using this... it blazes)

Did I mention it's extremely fast? ;)

> Interbase

I've never used this on a production project, only fscked around with it.
Wasn't impressed, but I didn't hate it. I think the project ios a bit
messed up, there was talk of a code fork about a week after they open
sourced it.

> DB2

Never used under linux, but it rocked under OS/2 several years ago. I
would expect no less under linux.

> PostgreSQL

Proper (ie. standard) transaction support, better support for SQL standard
(comparing to MySQL here), not as fast as MySQL, there's a fulltext module
for it, never used it though.

...

My preference for websites not requiring large e-commerce solutions is
MySQL - It's faster. It's been made pretty apparent on the list that a lot
of folks feel MySQLs shortcomings (nasty transaction handling, shady on
SQL standards) rule it out, and PostgreSQL is a better fit. Certainly if
your application involves transactions consider PostgreSQL.

The good news is *ALL* of your choices have professional support available
from various organizations, so whatever you go with you're not alone. ;)

My advice would be to download and play with each one, doing something
simple to see how you like it. Take a look at other sites that are similar
to the one you are building and see if you can find out what they're using
-- and why. 

I don't know about the DB2/Linux community (or even if there
is one), but your other choices come with a mob of folks ready to help you
out on mailing lists, web boards, and IRC.


--
Niall Kavanagh, niall at kst.com
News, articles, and resources for web professionals and developers:
http://www.kst.com
Pikachu tastes like chicken.

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