Hello.
I have been tasked with evaluating open source databases for a large upcoming project: e-commerce, B2B, high availability.
The O/S is most likely to be Linux, although FreeBSD could possibly be used (lower probability).
So far, it seems that MySQL, MaxDB, PostgreSQL, and Interbase/Firebird are possible candidates.
Does anyone know why we should or should not use any of these? Does anyone know of other possibilities?
I'd very much appreciate hearing your comments and recommendations.
I have only recently started these evaluations. BTW, my own background is from the Oracle DBA world.
MySQL is certainly popular and seems to have very good performance, but I am concerned that the lack of Triggers, Stored Procedures, User-Defined Functions, and Views (to a lesser degree ) will be a disadvantage.
MaxDB "appears" to be more feature-rich and possibly more industrial-strength. How does its performance and stability compare to the others?
Many Thanks. Jerry Apfelbaum Toronto
Jerry,
Interbase/Firebird looks good on paper. But there are a couple of things to watch out for.
1) Check the Borland Interbase newsgroups for "corruption" to see if it is still an issue. I know from reading their newsgroups a few years back , there were quite a few postings. It could of been due to inadequate hardware or some external source like a misconfigured server or power failure. There are many sites that use IB without such problems but it is worth checking it out (especially how to successfully repair a damaged IB/FB database because all the tables are stored in one file).
2) Speed problems. I don't know how much data your tables will have, but IB/FB has a habit of slowing down as more rows are added/deleted. They have an automated Sweep process that cleans out the updated/deleted rows (deleted & updated rows still take up space until the database is swept). Even so a large db will still slow down. I suspect the problem is due to unbalanced indexes. The only way to fix it is to unload all your data and reload it back in. Some people do it once a week.
3) The server CPU load will increase rapidly after the first 5 or 6 users. In other words IB/FB requires a much faster CPU than the same number of users for MySQL. It is a very CPU intensive DB server. There was an earlier problem with IB Super Server not running well on multiple processors (it actually slowed things down). I believe this has been fixed in IB version 6.5. I don't know if this was fixed in FB because FB may be running IB Classic (single processor) version.
Mike
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