Free SQL DBMSs: a survey as of August 2002

I'm posting what I think is a reasonably complete survey of SQL DBMSs that are useful for commercial purposes without any charge.

I have excluded DBMSs which are free as beta versions (e.g. ThinkSQL at thinksql.com), free for education only (e.g. Yard SQL at www.yard.de), or royalty-free after an initial payment (e.g. CodeBase at codebase.com or Microsoft's MSDE). It turns out that almost all products on the list are open source, but I'll note that a royalty-free package can be cheaper than an open-source package under some circumstances: for example if you want to incorporate a GPL'd DBMS in your commercially distributed application you may have to make terms with the DBMS maker which involve per-copy payments under a non-GPL license.

Beagle SQL () This one seems to be moribund, I can find no current download site.

CQL (http://www.cql.com/) Written with Visual C++.

DBMaker (http://www.dbmaker.com/linux/) Sorry, the free-distribution license program was cancelled in February.

Firebird (http://www.ibphoenix.com) Forked from InterBase 6.0.

Gadfly (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gadfly/) For Python fans. I have seen a debian.org announcement saying this project is "orphaned" but it's still there.

GNU SQL (http://www.ispras.ru/~kml/gss/) The web page hasn't been updated in a long time, and there may be some issues -- see the comments by Jens Glaser at http://www.jens.de/gsql/.

hsql (http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net/) 100% Java. Superseding Hypersonic SQL.

InterBase (http://www.borland.com/interbase/) Borland appears to be moving away from open-source in their current version, but these people change policy often.

Mckoi (http://mckoi.com/database/) 100% Java. Probably will be out of beta soon.

mSQL (http://www.hughes.com.au/) Version 3.0 just arrived on July 31 2002. But apparently there's no "free" version now.

MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) Popular and powerful. Often accused of missing standard features but they're building fast, I'd expect the main objections to disappear when version 4.1 is stable.

Ocelot (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocelot) I work for the makers, but allow me this tiny plug. It's 100% standard. Windows.

PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org/) Very popular on Linux but not on Windows. All the big-league features are there and the product has been around for a long time..

PQL (http://sal.kachinatech.com/H/1/PQL.html) Rather a small subset, several years old.

Quadcap (http://www.quadcap.com/home.html). Yet another 100% Java implementation.

SAP (http://www.sapdb.org/) Supported by a large company (SAP AG of Germany).

SQLite (http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/) Public domain C code.

The most popular items are clearly MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird.

Peter Gulutzan
Co-Author of SQL Performance Tuning which Addison-Wesley will publish on September 20 2002 Received on Sat Aug 10 2002 - 01:25:03 CEST