Help me choose the right database server.

["Shulzhenko Vasyl" <vasilis@softline.kiev.ua>]

>On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 10:52:03 -0400, "Nitin Mule" <n_mule@hotmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I'm evaluating a number of database servers and would appreciate your
>>suggestions. The products on my list are (feel free to add more):
>>
>>mySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix, Oracle
>>
>>The criteria for evaluation (in order of decreasing importance) are:
>>
>>1. Must run on Linux (Redhat 5.2)
>>2. Ability to serve about 20 MS ACCESS clients *efficiently*
>>3. Easy to integrate databases with web applications running on Linux with
>>Apache
>>4. Easy to setup and administer (There is no full-time DBA here).
>>5. Reasonable cost
>>
>>Though I've done some programming with Oracle in the past, I'm not familiar
>>with the capabilities of all the databases with regard to the criteria I
>>outlined above. To begin my evaluation, I looked at several open source
>>products like postgreSQL, mySQL etc. I installed the latest PostgreSQL and
>>did some testing to see whether it meets our expectations. I chose it over
>>mySQL because it supports transactions. I also installed the DBI/DBD
>>modules and tested some sample scripts and that looked great. Then I
>>installed the ODBC driver and connected to the postgreSQL database using MS
>>Access. However, this works very slow and that eliminates PostgreSQL from
>>my list.
>>
>>Then I looked at Informix SE (another free product). I believe openlink has
>>an ODBC driver for Informix and I'm not surprised to see DBD::Informix. The
>>documentation looks great and I hope I can install/administer/program it
>>without much hassle (with a little help from Net!). The documented
>>capabilities (e.g table/field capacity) far exceed our requirements. It
>>looks like a great deal worth considering seriously. But only if it's fast
>>enough (i.e. less annoying to users) to serve 20 MS ACCESS clients. If this
>>doesn't work, I will consider Informix IDS or Oracle 8, but don't know how
>>they compare and might improve the situation.
>
>If SE isn't fast enough, I'd look closely at your client code. SE is a
>very nice, nearly zero maintenance database engine. With a proper
>database design and goos indexing, it's quite fast enough. We expect
>sub-second response on tables with over 600K records, and get it.
>
>I currently have & use SE, IDS on linux & Solaris, Oracle 8 on Solaris
>& NT, postgreSQL on Solaris, Progress 8 on Solaris & NT. 
>
>SE is my favourite database engine for anything up to say 4Gb database
>size. It's *not* free for commercial use, but it's worth paying for,
>esp. if you're short on DBA time/expertise.
>
>Peter Wiley
>