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On Mon, Mar 05, 2001 at 11:21:35AM +0000, Barry Jeapes wrote:
> Im in the very early stages of developing an intranet website where I
> have scope to
> choose which DBMS software I want to install and use.
>
> Since this is a new area of web development for me I have little/no
> experience of which DBMS' are good and bad. Of course I could just try
> a few, but as always time scales dont allow me to mess around finding
> which are suitable / unsuitable from scratch.
> Any of you guys willing to recommend some software or even suggest some
> that arent up to much?
> Maybe there are some independant websites around that review DBMS'? I
> havnt found any.
>
> It will be installed onto a UNIX system (Solaris). The intranet is
> currently served by Apache.
>
> Your advice / help will be much appreciated.
This highly depends on what you're doing.
The most robust (albeit arcane) RDBMS on the market is Oracle. If your needs
demand a server that is fully SQL92 Entry Level compliant, Oracle is one of
the very few choices out there. If you plan on handling tens of gigabytes of
data, or thousands of transactions per second, or you consider your
implementation mission-critical, then I wouldn't advise anything less. If you
plan on growing into any of the above categories, then you would be wise to
start off here, as Oracle will scale with you. Of course, the monetary cost for
Oracle is decidedly non-trivial, and the highest-end setups of Oracle are
generally reserved for those companies with unlimited funds. Bank on a minumum
of $20,000 for an entry-level system.
There are plenty of other commercial databases, if that's your thing; Sybase and
DB2 come to mind as choices some people swear by. But I can't speak from
experience on those.
If all you need is a reasonably fast and robust RDBMS, you might look at
PostgreSQL. If you're heavily into Open Source, or you lack the funds for a
commercial option, then PG is the most advanced database around. The current
beta version (7.1) has massive performance improvements.
If you plan to do very heavy reads and very few concurrent writes, then MySQL is
an option. Be advised, though, that its standards support pales in comparison
to the aforementioned. It is fast at reads and that's about it. If your
application demands lots of concurrent updates then you should avoid MySQL like
the plague; its bass-ackwards locking mechanism deadlocks far too easily,
leaving your entire application dead in the water. It also lacks most of the
advanced querying and data integrity features that SQL92 mandates (e.g. foreign
keys, views, subqueries, etc.).
Perhaps the most mitigating factor is what, if anything, you (or those working
with you) have experience with. Why learn X when everyone already knows Y?
- --
Stephen Clouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Senior Programmer, IQ Coordinator Project Lead
The IQ Group, Inc. <http://www.theiqgroup.com/>
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