Specialized, Open Source Databases?

Posted by Cliff on Monday April 7, 2003 @04:50AM from the preventing-the-reinvention-of-the-wheel dept.

PyTHON71 asks: "I've been asked the head of the Wichita State University Anthropology department to help fix his growing biological anthropology collection database. It's currently in Access (insert boo's and hisses), but he is willing to have it developed in a reliable open source format. Now, there are a lot of university departments out there that need to have specialized work done on a small budget. They can't rely on just any developer, because the developer has to know biological anthropology (in this case) as well as MySQL, etc. And since it's not in the Hacker Code to duplicate work that's already been done, I was wondering what specialized database projects are out there & available for general use (not the data, just the structure)."

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Re:What about Access? by SLiK812 · 2003-04-07 05:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

The problem is Access's data storage is in a flat file format. Which means it'll be slower than dookie after it gets to be a certain size and complexity. Especially when sharing the database with many users. I'd suggest SQL Server, with a vb frontend or even an Access frontend with the SQL Server tables linked into Access.

Unfortunately the question was pertaining to open source, probably because the owner of the data, doesn't want to drop a chunk of change on a major database. Yes Access comes with Windows, but the performance issue is too big.