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Try looking here . Version 7.1 should allow you to insert large (>8kB) amounts of text without having to use the large object interface (i.e. a simple INSERT/SELECT/UPDATE will do). If you're planning on implementing large object storage under PHP, read here about the pg_lo* functions, it has some useful examples.

you get what you pay for

Oh really?

"Free your mind and your ass will follow"

Postgres is not GPL'd - it's a BSD license, which makes it far friendlier to embedded systems developers than MySQL (eg: Cobalt RAQs).

I thought you could.

I'd feel reasonably safe if my hospital used PostgreSQL, though, since it supports transactions and such, and operates in full write-through mode by default.

It's not just for GUI, you know :)

For a web-server you can have either:

• mod_dtcl in your Apache
• install NeoWebScript, which is an Apache with TCL and tons of TCL extensions
• use AOLServer -- don't let the name scare you, it is a highly-optimized multi-threaded web server. Its main features include database connection-pooling and a powerful Tcl API for application development
• install tclhttpd -- a web-server written entirely in TCL (with SSL support available), which works quite well for me

Your database may be MySQL or PostgreSQL (my preference).

PostgreSQL can be built with TCL support (a client library loadable into a TCL interpreter) and a server-side extension allowing you to write server-side procedures in TCL (not anemic at all, IMHO). Postgres can be built to support SSL connections and comes with pgaccess -- a fairly powerfull database browsing and management GUI-tool (written in TCL/TK).

For MySQL there are also at least two TCL-extensions that provide for TCL access to its client API:

• mysqltcl
• TCL-mySQL

For distributed objects, etc. you could use TCL-DP. Don't let the word beta scare you -- it does wonders. The remote ends can even talk over e-mail!

And there is nothing to beat TCL/TK for a cross-platform front-end application! That's a given...

-mi

P.S. It sucks that paragraph-tags can not have attributes in /. comments. IMHO <p align="justify"> is perfectly valid and quite desirable for a paragraph with over 120 characters...

It's not just for GUI, you know :)

For a web-server you can have either:

• mod_dtcl in your Apache
• install NeoWebScript, which is an Apache with TCL and tons of TCL extensions
• use AOLServer -- don't let the name scare you, it is a highly-optimized multi-threaded web server. Its main features include database connection-pooling and a powerful Tcl API for application development
• install tclhttpd -- a web-server written entirely in TCL (with SSL support available), which works quite well for me

Your database may be MySQL or PostgreSQL (my preference).

PostgreSQL can be built with TCL support (a client library loadable into a TCL interpreter) and a server-side extension allowing you to write server-side procedures in TCL (not anemic at all, IMHO). Postgres can be built to support SSL connections and comes with pgaccess -- a fairly powerfull database browsing and management GUI-tool (written in TCL/TK).

For MySQL there are also at least two TCL-extensions that provide for TCL access to its client API:

• mysqltcl
• TCL-mySQL

For distributed objects, etc. you could use TCL-DP. Don't let the word beta scare you -- it does wonders. The remote ends can even talk over e-mail!

And there is nothing to beat TCL/TK for a cross-platform front-end application! That's a given...

-mi

P.S. It sucks that paragraph-tags can not have attributes in /. comments. IMHO <p align="justify"> is perfectly valid and quite desirable for a paragraph with over 120 characters...

That's incorrect. From the PostgreSQL-hackers mailing list (msg):

Nope. If it were due to the ODBC driver, then MySQL and PostgreSQL would not have had comparable performance in the 1-2 user case. The ODBC driver is a per-client interface so would have no role as the number of users goes up.

1. The proprietary RDBMS tested "were not IBM, Informix, or Sybase".
2. One "other" propriety RDBMS "prefers to run on NT"
3. Every RDBMS tested used ODBC, so every RDBMS is handicapped by it ("apples-to-apples" comparison).
4. The test system specs: single 600MHz Pentium III, 512MB RAM, 2x18GB SCSI hot-pluggable.

There is a PDF for the upcoming Addison-Wesley book, by none other than PostgreSQL's Bruce Momjian, available here.

http://www.postgre sql.org/mhonarc/pgsql-general/2000-06/msg00390.htm l

If you take a look here you'll see there's one in the works. However, the author has been kind enough to post the book here :) -- Mando

If you take a look here you'll see there's one in the works. However, the author has been kind enough to post the book here :) -- Mando

And $Oz2500 PER CPU for an "Internet Connector" licence if we want our SQL database to be web-enabled.

If you think that's absurd, look at what Philip Greenspun has to say about RDBMS pricing. M$ $QL $erver is actually one of your cheapest options, and one of only two commercial RDBMSes that actually publishes prices. (SOLID is the other one.) M$ $QL $erver, for what it is, actually isn't that bad (they stole most of it from Sybase), although it bites big for most web stuff because it supports a laughable 256 character VARCHAR and because all of the JDBC drivers are closed-source and expensive (you can use the ODBC-JDBC bridge, but it's slow).

Of course, I'd recommend PostgreSQL if you don't want to pay for a database, or MySQL if you don't want to pay for a filesystem. :-)


~wog

They can use postgresql. it's free and supposedly much better than mysql

(Commercial) support like you say is just one of the arguments upon which the enterprise design should be based. I think there are some other points that are more important.

1) Human resources.
How many administrators and developers can you bring together with good knowledge of those IBM components (AIX, Websphere, DB2)? Here Linux or FreeBSD clearly beat AIX. For webapplication developers with Java and RDMS skills the scale (for now) is probably a bit more even, due to healthy competition between the different webapplication frameworks.

2) Product Continuity.
The basic architecture you lay down now will probably be around for a few years, maybe even more, so having your products evolve in sync with new standards is very important. OSS projects, by their very nature, nearly always tend to more aware of interoperabillity than their closed source equivalents.

3) Security, Robustness, Scalability, Performance.
I think the the OSS models, in general create products that score quite good on each of these points, especially when they have been activly developed on during more than a few years.

4) Product functionality.
The XML and Java features of the Java Apache Project or the entreprise ready Enhydra server (with commercial support from Lutris) are already more advanced than those of the IBM Websphere modules. Combine that with an excellent RDMS (with full JDBC driver support) like PostgreSQL and I think you got an excellent webapplication platform that is able to quickly evolve with future technology extensions.

- just my Euro 0.02c

Unless, of course, you wanted us to go to that Digital Couple website.

Someday I hope the open source world will progress to the point where it will stop getting excited every time some corporation tosses a failing product over the wall.

Incidentally, from eavesdropping on the postgresql developer list, I gather that their take on interbase is that postgresql will be as good or better by around 7.1 or 7.2 (the current release is 7.0). I believe the only key feature postgresql is missing at the moment is outer joins.

(Warning, blatant religious evangelism follows.) Postgresql is BSD liscensed, and has a really good team of open source developers actively working on it, including Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian... (unlike Inprise, which is now in the position of trying to drum up community support using an MPL-style license).

Postgresql has been making rapid improvements over the last year or so (though it still has the worst name of any software project, ever...). Bruce Momjian has a book coming out about postgresql and the full text is available online. Commercial support for postgresql is available from places such as Great Bridge.

(And whatever you do, don't mention Perl in this thread, or you'll have the Python fanatics in here too.)

Someday I hope the open source world will progress to the point where it will stop getting excited every time some corporation tosses a failing product over the wall.

Incidentally, from eavesdropping on the postgresql developer list, I gather that their take on interbase is that postgresql will be as good or better by around 7.1 or 7.2 (the current release is 7.0). I believe the only key feature postgresql is missing at the moment is outer joins.

(Warning, blatant religious evangelism follows.) Postgresql is BSD liscensed, and has a really good team of open source developers actively working on it, including Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian... (unlike Inprise, which is now in the position of trying to drum up community support using an MPL-style license).

Postgresql has been making rapid improvements over the last year or so (though it still has the worst name of any software project, ever...). Bruce Momjian has a book coming out about postgresql and the full text is available online. Commercial support for postgresql is available from places such as Great Bridge.

(And whatever you do, don't mention Perl in this thread, or you'll have the Python fanatics in here too.)

Check out this PostgreSQL book (PDF). I read through it, and found myself going "Ah-HA!" quite often. It has sensible examples of SQL queries, including many of the advanced features.

There aren't too many books that illuminate a subject for me as well as this one did. It's a free download, and (bonus) written using LyX.

-- Dirt Road

Now that MySQL supports transactions, I would probably go with it over PostgresSQL.

Even though Sybase hasn't open-sourced their Sybase-SQL server and Adaptive Server Enterprise (and they probably never will), I prefer using Sybase over both PostgresSQL and MySQL. Sybase SQL server 11.0.3 on Linux is free for commercial use.

and no, I'm not affiliated, etc...I just like 'em
---
Interested in the Colorado Lottery?

Re: [SQL] locked my keys in the car

accursed database!

Bruce Momjian (from the PostgreSQL steering committee is currently working on a book for Addison-Wesley. Not only is the book very good, but it is also available online at the PostgreSQL web site, and is available in either HTML or PDF formats.

The book is pretty complete, and even has sample programs using the 13 (Yikes!) available programming interfaces. Allowing you to compare the interfaces to Python, Perl, C, PHP, Java, and all the rest. Although I have to admit that it is a little strange that Bruce's Perl example is using the Pg module and not DBD::Pg. For those of you that are curious there is a DBI interface for PostgreSQL, and it is quite good.

Unfortunately in this particular case it would appear that O'Reilly has been beaten to the punch. I would highly doubt that O'Reilly would be able to find someone that knows PostgreSQL as well as Mr. Momjian, and the book is very well written. So if you are like me and use PostgreSQL quite a bit you will undoubtedly have to settle for at least one book on your bookshelf that isn't from O'Reilly. It's too bad really, I sort of like having all of my books match, and the O'Reilly Animal Series covers are very cool :).

If you want cheap, go MySQL or Access (Muahahaha!)

1) It's very simple to install

PostgreSQL isn't that diffacult to install. It comes standard with redhat now.

2) It's very fast

About a year ago I was considering using MySQL for some stuff I'm working, on but I decided against it. IIRC the reason MySQL is fast because it doesnt support things like transactions and replication. If you add few features then you essentially have PostgreSQL with a few different datatypes. It appeared that If I ever wanted data integrity I would have to either use Postgresql or pay for something like Informix

3) PostgreSQL only really came of age recently

Actually Postgres has been around for quite a while (officially started in 1996). I'm pretty sure it supported transactions back in 1998 (possibly before that).

john

Fault tolerance was a big issue. We've started by load balancing anything that could easily be balanced, but balancing MySQL is harder. We're funding development efforts with the MySQL team to add database replication and rollback capabilities to MySQL (these improvements will of course be rolled into the normal MySQL release as well).

__________________________________________________ ___

• The relevance of mentioning "Big Iron" is that this is what made Ellison rich.

  Oracle doesn't get its revenue flows from selling Network Computers with StrongARM chips; that was a loss. It makes its money off selling licenses and services for the DBMS products.

• I will believe that PostgreSQL (which is quite distinct from Postgres ) has "serious corporate backing," as compared to ODS, when we see availability of at least two of the following:
  • An XA interface is produced for PostgreSQL
  • Tuxedo becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • MQSeries becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Talarian becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Tibco TIB becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Tengah becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • R/3 can run atop PostgreSQL
  • PeopleSoft can run atop PostgreSQL

  Those are good examples of "enterprise" software that integrates with ODS and (on the middleware side) are used to allow ODS to be used to build very large scalable applications.

  Substitute MySQL for PostgreSQL as needed here...

By the way, Michael Stonebraker answered the question, Is there a connection between the Ingres and Postgres projects? back in 1994 with the clear answer of NO .

The fact that Oracle licensing fees are more blatantly large makes it rather clearer that Oracle is out to Take Care Of Your Money (by putting it in their bank account!), which shows off the clear need to periodically use other vendors' DBMSes.

The other fortunate thing is that Oracle primarily is connected to selling Big Databases, which is something that only people with big chequebooks tend to get involved with.

There is not any reasonable likelihood of any of the "libre" options ( e.g. - PostgreSQL, InterBase, MySQL, ... becoming reasonable alternatives at the Big Iron / Enterprise end of things any time soon, although they may become quite reasonable choices for "small, departmental" applications.

All you need to do is to look at the licensing of Designer 2000 and see how while the fees may rise exponentially, this results in a die-off of deployment amongst anyone that doesn't have deep pockets...

the main thing that's not quite clear from the first paragraph is that postgres shared essentially no code with ingres. (a few hundred lines were ripped off for some utility code.)

At the bottom of the story was a mention that release 7 had been released today!
So I check, and voila:

ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/v7.0/

Guess what? Neither does PostgreSQL (you can use triggers, but that's a pain). A bit of a PITA, but a well-written app can keep the integrity OK though.

This is true for PostgreSQL versions 6.5.x and below.

Postgresql 7.0 (which is now up to Beta 5, will have support for foreign keys, and more goodies.

If your definition of "critical" doesnt require transactions and all the fancy stuff, but does require very good performance, then MySQL is great. If your do require full ACID, then you'll just have to pay the price of one of the bigger players.

Well, as the article referenced by this thread suggests, some of "the fancy stuff" missing in MySQL includes real triggers and things that would actually speed up many MySQL web apps.

More importantly, you don't have to buy Oracle to get ACID; just get PostgreSQL instead. Open-source, and with a pH value only a fraction of a unit away from pure ACIDity.

Moderators: this post is only redundant if you assume that people have read the article; that's all I'll say.

As a professional IT consultant working for one of the top names in the software industry I am working on a detailed report into the "open source" phenomenon (thanks to various people for pointing out that it is not freeware per se) as started by Linus Torvalds with his Linux operating system some six years ago. I browse this forum for insights into the Linux user and developer communities.

Allow me to correct you a bit further. "Open Source" is essentially a marketing program (on practical grounds rather then idealogical) for "free software". Richard Stallman started the free software movement when he started the GNU Project in 1984 with the aim of creating a freely-distributable reimplementation of Unix.

Linus Torvalds significantly popularized free software with Linux (which he started in 1991). Linus provided the last missing piece of the hitherto incomplete GNU system -- the kernel. It's a critical component, but bear in mind that without the prior work of the GNU project, Linux wouldn't be where it is today.

The "Open Source" movement was created in response to Netscape's announcement in January 1998 that they would release the source code to their browser. The relabeling has been very effective, as can be seen in events of the past two years. Netscape's source code release has been viewed by some as less successful, but Mozilla is alive and well, and has made very significant progress since the original source code release. Jury's still out on this one; my personal belief is that Netscape will be making a comeback in the browser marked based on the Mozilla efforts.

Anyway, my question is, is there a fully-featured open source RDBMS out there? Your help is appreciated.

You might want to check out PostgreSQL. It's an object-oriented RDBMS with SQL support as well as transactional integrity. It used to be considered only suitable for academic use, but much work has been done in the last 5 years, and from what I've heard it's one of the most solid free databases out there...

There is a database which is free, which has high performance, which is reliable, which runs very well on Linux, which is reasonably easy to secure, which supports proper transactions with proper commits and rollbacks, which has a genuinely open-source license.

It's called PostgreSQL. It outperforms MySQL on just about any test you care to name. Get it.

MySQL is really fast, but it's not safe enough for everyone's data. If you're looking for a database with all the bells and whistles, and with a much nicer license than MySQL, look at PostgreSQL. Release candidates for version 7.0 are out and in testing, commercial support is offered by PostgreSQL Inc., PostgreSQL documentation is very extensive, and the community support (mailing lists, usenet) is very active. A very quick rundown of some of the features of PostgreSQL is available here (of course there's much more to a database engine than will fit in an HTML table).

--

MySQL is really fast, but it's not safe enough for everyone's data. If you're looking for a database with all the bells and whistles, and with a much nicer license than MySQL, look at PostgreSQL. Release candidates for version 7.0 are out and in testing, commercial support is offered by PostgreSQL Inc., PostgreSQL documentation is very extensive, and the community support (mailing lists, usenet) is very active. A very quick rundown of some of the features of PostgreSQL is available here (of course there's much more to a database engine than will fit in an HTML table).

--

1. Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?

   Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?

   Phillip:

   I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html .

   The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).

The implication here is ominous to me, in that he seems to be implying that someone interested in building a community oriented site shouldn't even bother trying to use an Open Source RDBMS.

I know that what he says is true about MySQL (for lack of transaction support, and the fact that it isn't truly Free) and PostgreSQL isn't yet 100% SQL2-compliant, but is it possible that

1. a. One of these could be adapted to be more fitting for these types of applications? or,

2. b. Borland/Inprise Interbase 6.0 could be appropriate?

It is fully GPL'ed, fully SQL2-compliant, and very fully-featured compared to the alternatives. It is somewhat slower than PostgreSQL (and much slower than MySQL, of course) with more simultaneous connections, but if we could garner enough support from the Open Source community to build a decent threading mechanism, I think it could easily beat PostgreSQL in the long run. It woulde be incredibly useful to have an Open Source alternative to Oracle.

There are other features that would probably take some time to hack together to make Interbase 6.0 competitive with Oracle, but if everybody just takes Phillip's advice (no offense, Phillip, I agree with 95% of what you say) instead of helping to develop alternative tools, we will never have an option at all.

Just my two cents.

There's a very clear and prominent link to it on the postgresql web page. Seems to me that that should be the first place to look for resources.
--

I gave up dB work a year or two ago. Maybe it was starting with MS Access and enjoying its compact, RAD, toy quality. Unscaleable and inapproriate for Enterprise stuff of course (and making no pretence to such garlands), but fast, small (well, the .mds were small if you compacted them) and fun.

The problem was the inevitable upgrade lead me to MS SQL Server 6.5 (I was stuck on NT at the time). SQL Server had a lot of stuff I was missing in Access - triggers, stored procedures, scaleability - but it also brought a lot of frustrations. The domain aggregate functions were poorer than those offered by Access, which was a pain as I was trying to roll my own OLAP before it all got proprietarized into a Babel of different buyouts and skill-subsets. Its big-iron feel didn't stop it having a ludicrous 255 byte limit on varchar fields. For bigger you had to futz about wastefully amalgamating BLOBs of text with READTEXT/WRITETEXT. Plus it was grotesquely high-maintenance. I didn't want to become a DBA. I just wanted to hack SQL. And wasteful. The 'devices' ('Honey, I bloated the database') were huge and couldn't be shrunk, no matter how svelte the actual data.

By the time I escaped the NT shop I was naively looking to Oracle to save me from these frustrations. Unfortunately, I'll never know the joys or horrors of that particular 'platform', because at 600 Mb for the Linux installation I just bailed out and cried 'Enough of this grotesquely bloated crap!' and pursued XML or BerkeleyDB solutions to anything remoteley persistence-flavoured thereafter. I knew that fast and small were synonyms, but the vendors were growing fat on the antonym line and there was nothing I could do about it. Even MySQL and PostgreSQL were part of the problem. They're all emacs. None of them are vi.

Recently I ran my periodic, wishful, wistful Google-grep for 'fast', 'small' and 'rdbms' and found myself, after rejecting Brian Jepson's TinySQL as ridiculously small and cute but strictly pedagogical, finally discovering The One.

Hypersonic SQL, a tiny Open Source Java database weighing in at less than 100K, supports correlated subqueries, transactions, referential integrity, indexes, stored procedures and JDBC - everything basically, but GROUP BY, cursors and triggers. I never used cursors myself. I'd rather iterate in Perl. The other two, admittedly are fondly missed, but not life-threatening. It doesn't support failover. But with such a small, developer-friendly codebase anything's possible.

Did I say 'Perl'? 'But it's a Java database', I hear you cry. How can this beast talk Perl? Well, it can't, which is why I'm working on a Perl DBI interface to it talking to a native driver over TCP/IP. If anyone wants to contribute (I wouldn't need to hack it if some brave soul wants to polish up the languishing JNI module in JPL to support embedding Java in Perl on Linux (currently it only works for Win32)), please get in touch. I'm almost certainly way out of my depth and entering a world of pain.

Oh, did I mention? It's 7 times faster than SQL Server.

check the press release here. And like I said when the article was rejected, it's not opensource but at least it's not crippleware.

I think it's a shame though, as the backend of mysql seems to be much worse then postgreSQL.

I like MySQL. It's pretty much the 'standard', amazingly fast, and it has good support among a lot of different platforms (even M$!).
There _is_ however a bit of discussion possible about the quality of the mysql source code.
I think it will be safe to assume that MySQL is heavily optimized for speedy operation, but in my experience this sometimes has a negative influence on the clearness and security of the source code.
I have spent some time looking at the MySQL source code, trying to find vulnerabilities (sue me, i've got weird hobbies), and it isn't a pretty sight (you can see the first part of my results here, if you're interested).
Apart from the source code - MySQL has a license that's not entirely clean, as well (it looks free, but it isn't ).
Taking a look at postgresql, i see lots of clean code, features, and a better license.
I still think that MySQL is a cool database system, but from the source code and licensing scheme, I take the performance panelty, and use postgresql.

The continued popularity of MySQL amongst the open-source community continues to amaze me. MySQL is not open source. Go read their license. It's not even free as in beer. Almost incidentally, it's not a database either. Their is no transaction support which means that if your box goes down the database is likely to be in an incosistent state, and there is no easy way to fix it. The stunning thing is that their is a real database that is open source as well. PostgreSQL.

• pgp has saved many lives in oppresive regimes (read zimmermans homepage)
• PBS just announced that they are rolling out 600 desktops of win2000 (600*$200=!!!)

I'm really sorry, but I'm curious why it has a Score 5 (I'm not bitching, I just want to know why it's so funny :P)

It's very simple. In this case, 3 moderators decided at roughly the same time that the post in questions deserved to be a 'Score:2, Informative', while a fourth decided an instant later that it should be a 'Score:2, funny'; pow: it's a 'Score:5, funny'.

Or, in other words, Slashdot's RDBMS backend doesn't use place moderation updates inside a transaction. This should be simple enough to fix unless they're silly enough to use a database that doesn't support transactions. But who would do something silly like that? :-)

If I'm right about this, the Postgresql folks are entitled to one collective "nyeah, nyeah, we told you so!" on this topic.

Not that I have anything against MySQL, but depending on your needs, PostgreSQL may be a better choice for an RDMS. It is open source, and has transactions, triggers, a procedural language, and API's for languages like C, C++, perl, and python (and MySQL may have some of these as well). Of course, your mileage may vary.

<quote>
But what tools are available to actually incorporate XML in a system that can do all things we poor webdesigners dream of?
</quote>

There are many tools available to build such a system.

To mention only Open Source projects, I could suggest using Apache JSERV with Apache Cocoon as a framework, Castor or Quick to bind XML data to Java objects and a OODBMS like ozone or a RDBMS like PostgreSQL.

These are my favorites ;)

They are very powerful and highly flexible, but the price to pay is that they are rather complex to use, that you need time to get on speed with them and that you loose focus on the core techniques behind them.

To try to get a good understanding of these core techniques, I have set up some simple examples showing how one can bind XML documents into java objects, store these objects in a OODBMS and use them in a XSLT sheet both in standand alone mode or as a servlet.

These examples are available on our web at http://downloads.dyomedea.com/java/ and a mailing list has been created to exchange and discuss such basic tips.

Hope this helps.

Eric van der Vlist

According to the company history:

Prolog Development Center (PDC) was founded in 1984 with the development of a Prolog compiler - later to be known as Turbo Prolog, PDC Prolog and now Visual Prolog as its main activity. Since then PDC has established itself as a world leader in the development of Prolog and related products.

Today, PDC consists of an R&D and a consultancy division. The R&D Division is concerned with the development of the Visual Prolog compiler together with new methodologies and development tools.

Borland might be an evidence against the common contention that "Microsoft is the company that never produces anything, but merely buys out products from other companies that are creative," as many of Borland's products were not natively produced, but rather resold on behalf of other componies.

By the way, that was Ashton Tate that used to own the dBase trademark...

As for integration with DBM variants, I see little importance to that. InterBase is a relational database (or at least, as relational as they come), as opposed to merely being a data store. The value would be in sharing code between InterBase and PostgreSQL or MySQL, or maybe using InterBase as a "data store" for persistent data in KDE or GNOME.

MS SQL is quite quick as far as RDBMS's go, too bad it isn't a RDBMS itself, which makes it an unacceptable choice for many applications. If one wanted to go with an Open Source solution as opposed to Oracle then they might try PostgreSQL.

Best of luck to ya'.

//Johan

You can buy one, but is there a OSS ODBMS out there?

One of PostgreSQL's lesser-known features is that it is not just a relational db, but a full object-relational system.

I think this is a better approach than pure OODBMS's -- I've had bad experiences with them; ad-hoc queries are a pain, and only God can save you if a pointer gets corrupted and your db suddenly forgets how to find half the data you put it.