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How Real Is The Open Source Database Fever?
J. Misael G. points out a NewsForge article on recent moves by some database vendors to loudly release (some of) their products as open source, asking the vital question "How much open source beer are these newcomers bringing to the database bash, or are they simply coming in and asking where the cups are?" (Slashdot and NewsForge are both part of OSTG.)
It's to make it clear that the relationship exists, and allows you to consider if there may be some sort of conflict of interest. For example, when MSNBC does a story on Microsoft or NBC, they always point out that they're operated as a joint venture between the two.
Other than the obvious mySQL and PostgreSQL, I have tried two others... CA's Ingres and IBM's Cloudscape (which is an embedded DB).
Ingres was originally intended to compete with the likes of Oracle and MS SQL Server, but never had the power or client base. OpenSourcing Ingres looks like CA's attempt to beef up both in one shot. It's not a GPL license, just a chance to peek at the source and maybe help out. The interface that ships is very much like Oracle's.
Cloudscape is nice, but not even as powerful as PostgreSQL.
I think there is a huge market still untapped for open source DB's... especially RDBMS, but alas, large companies are (of course) slow to adopt.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
The late-1990s media buyouts created so much cross-ownership that every article can contain some hidden corporate bias, stemming from competition/cooperation between parent corporations publishing the story, and the subject of them. When the same corporation is reporting on itself, the story is extremely suspect. The media response has been to favor "full disclosure": mentioning the corporate connection in the story as a disclaimer of "objectivity".
It's not good enough. People are increasing our acceptance of this conflict of interest the more we see it, rather than rejecting it more as it grows more pervasive and therefore more dangerous. Actual competitive conflicts are necessary to get critical interpretations, not just acknowledgement that interpretations might be selfserving propaganda. At least Slashdot has these discussions of stories, in which dissent can be communicated. My favorite system was the P2P "Third Voice", a browser plugin which let the user attach popup sticky notes to any web page, stored in a DB the plugin checked against the "background" page's URL. That way, P2P commentary could effortlessly appear right in the context being presented, without requiring cooperation from the provider of the target content. The project folded, but I welcome its return. Only the flexibility, complexity and scale of the public is enough to compensate for the advantages that centralized corporate media has in lying to us.
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make install -not war
From the article:
> PostgreSQL has a much richer feature set but
> has scalability problems and doesn't have
> a company behind it providing
> enterprise-level support;
Bah. What about this? Lots of companies there, and many of the folks involved are core PostgreSQL developers...
The Army reading list
I am prepared to stand corrected, but IIRC MySQL can be used on an in-house database with no additional license.
Saying that, giving something back (buying a license) helps them to keep developing it, and it's well priced.
Based on old Borland Interbase
Help fight continental drift.
The GPL is usually considered to not apply to internal distribution. MySQL thinks differently. What the courts think will be very interesting to find out.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Commercial license is NOT required for in-house (written and distributed) app running on one server. If we replicate to another server for web access, then we would need a commercial license.
Many small office I.T. managers may now breathe a small sigh of relief, or begin investigating http://www.postgresql.org/
Go to "technet.oracle.com". Look around for the free downloads. Oracle will absolutely laugh at you if you tell them that you actually followed these requirements (I'm serious, the Oracle Rep laughed at us).
As a general rule, Oracle doesn't get too bent out of shape until they are on a push to generate revenue. As far as I can tell, no one at Oracle can tell you how their licensing works. No one! I've talked with several long time DBA's, and with lots of Oracle reps. You get a lot of contradictory answers about how their licensing works. Even with named users (at times I've had that explained as "concurrent connections" or "how many different users might use it"). The first one means that each session is counted. One of them means a single person can have ten sessions open and that's fine.
In the end, if Oracle feels like coming in getting more money from you they'll come tell you you are violating the license and ask for money for compliance.
However, the OSS DB's don't offer higher end options such as clustering, distributed transactions, etc... While there are companies that really don't need clustering and simple data redundancy, a much larger actually do for disaster recovery, failover, etc..
Postgres and mysql both support replication and failover. Neither supports distributed transactions, but if you're just interested in disaster recovery and failover then you're covered.
It'd be stupid to use a DB for live high-value applications that didn't at least support master-slave replication with failover.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
There are tools to convert dia UML diagrams to and from PostgreSQL dump format.
There are also several other tools which have been discussed on the PostgreSQL lists.... Personally, I find my imagination to be better than any such tools I have ever used (including VS.Net on Windows), but I understand why people want them. Many of the other tools are not open source, however.
Another possibility is to use PgAccess. This is not quite as powerful as the full diagram is not directly tied to the database, but it can work pretty well for visual modeling purposes.
I don't know at the moment whether Rekall has this capacity. It is more of a MS-Access clone..... Writing a plugin to do this visual modelling might not be too hard though....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Also, it simply isn't going to take nearly as much to develop products that are highly SQL language and library call compliant with products like Oracle and SQL Server compared to the effort that has gone into Wine.
I don't think you understand what a high-end database is. Oracle, for example, almost completely abstracts the underlying operating system. Oracle has its own thread scheduling subsystem, for example, with finer-grained quotas and priorities that most Unixes. It's the only way it can offer its whole feature set on the 90-odd platforms it runs on. It has its own authentication mechanisms and name resolution system, independant of NIS, LDAP, DNS, etc. It has its own filesystem - you can point Oracle at unformatted disks if you want, it will manage them just fine even if your OS can't mount them. It has several of its own interprocess communication mechanisms, including one with guaranteed delivery (or guaranteed notification of failure, either way nothing gets lost). It has its own networking subsystem, TNS - Oracle clients and servers don't care if your network is TCP/IP, DECNet, AppleTalk, whatever, they manage that themselves. And I've barely scratched the surface. Oracle is a good deal more complex than most of the operating systems it runs on - it would not be an exaggeration to say that Oracle is more complex than all of a Linux distribution. SQL is to Oracle as shell script is to Unix, just a very very small part of the whole.
DeZign for Databases (www.datanamic.com) works just fine for developing ERD, and ImportERScript should import a Postgres database creation script as well for DeZign. Then, let DeZign create a database modification script, and go from there...
My imagination works fine, too, but it's hard to make pretty reports and documentation from, and version control for my imagination or memory is just about non-existant...