Help me choose the right database server.

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. TIA, Nitin.

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