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The company I had previously worked for, we did a fair amount of "easy and basic" database manipulation. We had used the Informix db on our servers at our various sites, and it had a very easy to use text-based (possibly curses, is my guess) front-end. I don't remember the front-end having any other names, and I don't personally use informix, so I don't know if the front-end ships standard with informix or not?

I can't say the front-end was the most powerful thing in the world, but for our needs, it got everything done for us. . . After doing a little snooping around with it, it seems like it has a lot of functions that any basic - mid level user would need in order to manipulate a database.

Informix documentation remains amazing, despite the IBM buy out. IBM hasn't affected the quality at all.

They don't use just Objectstore. Lots of them use Informix too - like 8/10 of the world's traffic if you believe the adverts.

IBM wanted Red Brick and the only way to get it was to buy the rest of the Informix database business.

Red Brick

Although this opens a lot of possibilities it could also be rather dangerous. As long those plugins cannot mess with the core of the file system, I don't see much of a problem.

Illustra (bought by Informix a few years ago) had the conceptual great idea of Data Blades. Those where modules (plugins) you could write yourself to add additional functionality to the database engine and that there are a lot of rotten programmers out there.

I don't know, if this is still an issue. But a few years ago you had to have your Data Blades certified by Informix, otherwise a voided warranty (probably in terms of support) might have been the least of your worries.

Thanks for your interesting post.

They might have a pdf file with some info that you are looking for, but I doubt it.

They might have a pdf file with some info that you are looking for, but I doubt it.

There is software that does this on the DB side. The company that sells it could probably suggest a good way to store it as well.
We have looked at doing a similar thing because we produce 200 GB of images and movies every few months. Our web group and marketing group wants to get at this data later but doesn't know exatly what they want till they see it.
We are still looking at different solutions for this. Some suggestions have been SAN's (server area networks?) or other such things. These support terabytes of data and as long as the filesystem is in an order that makes sense, jumping to projects can be automated with shell scripts.

For databases, I know that Informix has Media360. I think that Oracle might have the same. I also know that there are 3rd party apps out there, but I can't think of the name.

There is software that does this on the DB side. The company that sells it could probably suggest a good way to store it as well.
We have looked at doing a similar thing because we produce 200 GB of images and movies every few months. Our web group and marketing group wants to get at this data later but doesn't know exatly what they want till they see it.
We are still looking at different solutions for this. Some suggestions have been SAN's (server area networks?) or other such things. These support terabytes of data and as long as the filesystem is in an order that makes sense, jumping to projects can be automated with shell scripts.

For databases, I know that Informix has Media360. I think that Oracle might have the same. I also know that there are 3rd party apps out there, but I can't think of the name.

Informix does indeed have a Linux version of both the SE engine and IDS engine. See Informix on Linux FAQs.&nbsp&nbspInformix was, AFAIK, the first major RDBMS to port to Linux.

• mike stonebraker is CTO of informix (see http://www.info rmix.com/informix/corporate/overview/execs/execs.h tm).
• mike stonebraker is also CTO of cohera (see http://www.cohera.com/stone.html).
• Relational Technology (RTI, subsequently Ingres Corp., then part of ASK, now part of CAI) was the commercialization of the University INGRES codebase. INGRES was a Berkeley project from the early 70s to the mid 80s.
• Miro Systems (subsequently Montage Software, then Illustra Information Technologies, now part of Informix) was the commercialization of the University POSTGRES codebase. POSTGRES was a Berkeley project from the mid 80s to the mid 90s.
• stonebraker has always released his research software in source form, even in the 70s and early 80s when this wasn't particularly fashionable (these days, the funding agencies make a much bigger deal of it). external contributors were always able to donate changes which were folded into the postgres source tree at berkeley. (most ports happened this way.) the only real change that happened with regards to licensing is that there used to be a UC-imposed license fee for commercial use. a couple of grad students talked stonebraker into talking UC into dropping this fee.
• systems like illustra have come to be known as ORDBMS (object-relational), which is very different from OODBMS. don't expect OQL - expect SQL3/SQL-1999.

Even if you limit your choices to one OS, you still have at least five or six great DB platforms.

The choices you've given are by no means the only ones you have, and the reasons you give for narrowing down your choice of engines seem to be pretty sparse.

For instance, Sybase ASE and ASA both support referential integrity constraints. ASE's are more limited than ASA's, but ASA has RI checks that are comparable to what I've seen of Oracle 8i.

All of Sybase's products have T-SQL, which are their programmatic extensions to SQL92. Sybase has a robust C API for writing server extensions.

Sybase ASE is fully capable of handling the data load you've specified. So is Oracle's enterprise-scale product. So are some of Informix's products.

Interesting tidbit about Postgres - parts of it found its way directly into a product called Illustra. Illustra was bought lock, stock and barrel by Informix. Informix has in one of their products the object-polymorphism you crave.

From the PostgreSQL Guide:

The authors of PostgreSQL 1.01 were Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen. Many others have contributed to the porting, testing, debugging and enhancement of the code. The original Postgres code, from which PostgreSQL is derived, was the effort of many graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff programmers working under the direction of Professor Michael Stonebraker at the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael Stonebraker spun Postgres into Illustra. For a while after the Informix buyout he was grafted into their executive management. I dunno if he's still there, since Informix doesn't seem to list that information on their site.

Informix still has grants at UCB as well as many, many other colleges. (source) Some of those grants sound interesting...

Now, I realize that the subject was "Linux Databases", but there are *solid* RDBMSs that run on the various BSD's and commercial *nix, too. I mention this because of the large scale data needs. I'm not sure that Linux running on any PC hardware is capable of supporting the amount of data you are looking at. (Notice I said PC hardware...)

Because of that, I'd suggest a commercial *nix, running on a server-class machine and an engine from one of the "big three" database vendors: Sybase, Oracle or Informix.

All of these vendors offer their enterprise-level engines at very reasonable prices, since you are buying at the per-seat level in most cases.

Of course, I'll likely get flamed to hell and back for the above statements because I'm suggesting commercial, non-GPL engines running on commercial, non-GPL OS's on top of hardware that wasn't built by stuffing armfuls of parts from Fry's into a whitebox ATX case.

If I were stuck cobbling things together because of budgetary constraints, I'd go with Linux running on a whitebox and use the free Sybase ASE installation that bundled with RedHat.