Re: Database recommendations?

johnson_d-j9pdmedNgrk@public.gmane.org
Fri, 23 Feb 2007 02:47:16 -0000

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.