Re: Free SQL DBMSs: a survey as of August 2002

paul_at_not.a.chance.ie (Paulie) wrote in message news:<3d552a9f.161415232_at_127.0.0.1>...
> What you really mean is Open Source (R)DBMS's, isn't it?
That wasn't my intent, but after excluding betas, demos, and requires-initial-payment offerings, it turns out almost all are open source.
> > 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.
> I don't think they'll be changing policy soon!
I am cautious about predicting what they will do. Perhaps that indicates that they've managed to confuse me in the past.
> AFAIK, you have to pay for [MySQL] transaction support and referential
> integrity support, even if your app is non-free.
Mr Tuuri has answered this, and similar would apply for MySQL/BDB. Mr Tuuri's company does sell a "hot backup" facility separately but support for transactions and foreign keys is part of the MySQL/InnoDB download.
> You are allowed plug, if you acknowledge that you are working for the
> company - what are the pros and cons of Ocelot?
The pro and con are the same: it's pure standard SQL. Therefore it supports constraints collations subqueries persistent-stored-modules cli etc. in a way that we think demonstrates the ansi/iso intent. On the other hand it ignores indexes paging unsigneds etc. (since they are not in the standard) so it is not in competition with the other packages in the list, their objectives differ.
> My own personal preference is for Firebird - I mean where else can you
> get a fully functional RDBMS in a 3 MB download (if you really penny
> pinch, you can get an app installed on a floppy!!!!)
That detail is not exclusive to Firebird, but the Mozilla-like license (which for commercial redistributors is better than GPL), and the enthusiastic user community, are both pluses.
> I think that SAP might move into the Open Source
> RDBMS niche as a leader.
SAP has some critics too. I'll leave the predicting to others.

Your commentary was intelligent and to the point. Thank you.

Peter Gulutzan
Co-Author of SQL Performance Tuning, advertised at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ocelotsql/tuning.htm Received on Sun Aug 11 2002 - 18:04:58 CEST