On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Ian C. Sison wrote:
..
> Coming from an oracle bigot, that's quite expected \8} But most people
> don't have the dinero for Oracle anyway, so there... Poor man's ldap and
> poor man's sql + poor man's software raid + poor man's OS = kick ass
> solution...!
Nope, I'm not an Oracle bigot. I'm quite aware of how much it costs. I've
gone from MySQL to Informix-SE to Informix-IDS to Sybase ASE to Oracle.
And now PostgreSQL. Although the majority of my experience is with MySQL
and Oracle.
Besides, Oracle practises the same think Linux does: it's sufficiently
complicated that I'm assured of employment for quite some time.. c'mon,
admit it, a lot of people are happy with Linux because it makes them
Needed, whereas Win2K would make them Un-Needed.
(of course Win2K would also cause lots of service outages, etc, etc)
I "push" Oracle because.. well, I know it, and it's the best. Well, DB2,
Oracle, and Informix Foundation.2000 are comparable in performance. Note
these are all closed-source products.
PostgreSQL is quite good, I've used it and I'm following the development
of the 7.1 series. When Pg can do what I need it to do, I'll willingly
ditch the resource- and money-hog called Oracle. But the bottom-line is,
Pg cannot do all that I want it to do.
Don't let me get started on MySQL.
If you want "enterprise database" and "free beer" Sybase Adaptive Service
Enterprise 11.0.3.3 for Linux is free-as-in-beer. Note that the latest
version of ASE is 12.4 so 11.x is pretty old (1997 vintage). But free as
in beer.
Unfortunately ASE versions < 12.x don't have row-locking (so they're worse
off than MySQL-current in concurrency), they don't support >2Kbytes per
row of scalar data (so no VARCHAR(4000) for you..) and they have serious
issues with storage of non-scalar data like BLOB's e.g. you can't index a
blob and it's stored separately from scalar data in the same row.
All in all, I'm not sold on Sybase. Even if it's free. Between ASE 11.x
and Pg 7.1, I'd go with Pg, no questions there.
There's another option: SAPDB. SAPDB (produced and open-sourced by SAP the
Big German Software Company) is a code-fork of Adabas D, which is a
well-regarded mainframe database. SAPDB is GPL now. I haven't had the time
to try it or bench it though.
--
Orlando Andico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Mosaic Communications, Inc.
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