Re: Database recommendations?

Philip Nelson
Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:30:47 -0000

Sergey,

The only reason I didn''t mention PostgreSQL is that I''ve not
personally got
any experience of it (not that I wouldn''t like to, but there are only
so many
hours in the day ...).

The vibes I get are that if you want Open Source, then PostgreSQL is more
advanced than MySQL.

As far as the "grandaddy", Oracle may have been first to market (and
suffers
still for that in some ways, since things done in haste sometimes have
problems) but the real "daddy of them all" is mainframe DB2 (now known
as DB2
for z/OS).  The experimental precursor to that was System-R, which was built
on the back of the IBM researchers who invented relational technology.

DB2 for z/OS is 25 years old (since it''s first generally available
release).

Of course, if you want to go for a "real man''s database"
still under active
development today, you''d have to go for IMS/DB (hierarchical database).

Still work with it on a daily basis, and we still run millions of
transactions per day against it.  It was developed as part of the Apollo
space program in the 60s.

Phil

On Friday 23 February 2007 14:15, Sergey Kuznetsov
wrote:
> You forgot to mention PostgreSQL, that''s the Open Source Oracle,
> granddaddy of of many Open Source
> and Commercial RDBMS :)
>
>
> PS: Even knowing about Interbase off-spring I chose PostgreSQL when I
> fleed from MySQL.
>
> All the Best!
> Sergey.
>
> johnson_d-j9pdmedNgrk@public.gmane.org wrote:
> > Philip Nelson wrote:
> >> In many ways, the choice of DBMS comes down to two things -
> >>
> >> 1) Experience (folks choose what they know and are comfortable
with)
> >> 2) Money (how much you are prepared to spend for the product and
> >> support)
> >
> > Phillip is dead on here.
> >
> > I am not a fan of MySQL, but it works well for backing web pages with
> > mostly static data.  When the Netfrastructure back end (a rewrite of
> > the firebird engine) is mainstream, it will move up at least one level
> > in my hierarchy of consideration.
> >
> > DB2 and Oracle are good choices because you can vertically scale the
> > DBMS into the midrange and  mainframe class systems (off of the WIntel
> > platforms), and both are robust with loads that are heavily
> > transactional.  While both have free and low cost limited licenses,
> > they also have a variety of license packages that scale from
> > vertically handheld to mainframe, and robust clustering options in the
> > commodity, midrange, and large systems.  I have found DB2''s
support to
> > be generally superior to Oracle''s.
> >
> > Firebird (my favorite) was originally architected for the Vax cluster
> > as a direct competitor for Oracle.  Its "classic"
architecture has
> > remained constant and a good fallback throughout its 30 year (more or
> > less) history.  The latter half of its life time has been focused on
> > the commodity systems (WIntel), but there are builds for Windows CE,
> > Intel64, AMD64, and PowerPC architectures also, so it scales
> > vertically at least to the midrange systems.  I have not checked the
> > status of Firebird 2, a ground-up rewrite (different from the
> > NetfraStructure rewrite), recently.  However, it brings
firebird''s
> > performance in line with MySQL and Postgres,without sacrificing
> > transactional integrity.
>
>

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