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Linux and Closed Source Databases

Posted by Hemos on from the good-overview dept.

Byte.com is featuring a column by Jon Udell regarding Linux and databases. Using comments from users, other tech industry people and personal industry, Udell takes a nice walk-through the closed-source databases, as well as documentation issues.

5 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Certainly Filled With Pros and Cons by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 4
    • The situation with Solid displays nicely that the use of non-free software provides exposure to the risk that a vendor will decide to "Change their Business Strategy."

      If Solid decides to move from selling licenses at $300 targeted at web servers to selling $10000 licenses targetted at use in embedded systems (speaking loosely of "embedded," of course), there is little that the customer can do.

      If IBM decides not to provide an upgrade next year for Linux, and push users over to running DB/2 on Monterrey, there may be little that the customer can do.

    • On the other hand, there are some tasks such as writing documentation and building test suites to verify compliance with standards that aren't "sexy" tasks and which thus have a tendancy to suffer on "free" DB platforms.

    I suppose the given is that there are some significant risks regardless of the approach you take.

    The observation that code should be written to be, as much as possible, independent of the DB engine, is certainly true. This diminishes the extent to which you're locked in.

    This is valuable whether we're talking about Oracle or MySQL.

    Related to this, it seems to me that people should be looking into using transactioning/messaging "proxies" like BEA Tuxedo (proprietary) or less proprietary things like the Isect message queuing system.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  2. This article is FUNNY! by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4
    I liked the mention of the conversation thread originator, root. Very nice to give him credit. Gosh, that "root" guy really gets around. He even has a login on my system, but I don't remember giving it out! Better check your Linux system, to see if he's been there, too!

    And then he talks about how it doesn't make sense to be religious about Free Software / Open Source when it's your business that counts, but the first thing you hear after that is how users got screwed because the product in question wasn't Open Source!

    Now, I agree that the world can hold both proprietary software and Free Software, and that the two can get along. It's just interesting that the article makes the point that you really can't trust a proprietary vendor to stay in the market, and thus you must code as if they won't.

    Thanks

    Bruce Perens

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  3. What about Sybase? by fence · · Score: 4

    I didn't see any mention of Sybase in this article-IMHO, the author left out a very robust database solution available to Linux users.

    Sybase currently offers two different versions of their database server for Linux:

    1) an older version 11.0.3.3 is available for free and you can do anything that you wish with it. Develop, deploy, e-commerce, etc. Free.
    2) their "latest" version 11.9.2 is available free via download or $100.00 for a couple of CD's and manuals. 11.9.2 is free (or $100) for development, but if you deploy it then you need to purchase a license from sybase.

    and no, I don't work for Sybase, I'm a happy user of Sybase on Linux, Solaris and HP-UX.

    check out Sybase at http://www.sybase.com
    or the Sybase on Linux FAQ at http://www.mbay.net/~mpeppler/linux.html

    --
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  4. The Unfortunate Compromise by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 3
    It is fair to say that, in the "Free software" arena, you have a choice of
    • PostgreSQL for "heavy-duty-functionality" versus
    • MySQL for "speed."
    What is unfortunate is that neither of these are really strong with regards to reliability even in the wake of hardware problems.
    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  5. DB admin. tools for Windows clients.... by V. · · Score: 3

    Some IS people from my Uni. approached me at our LDD to ask about moving their databases from NT/SQL and Linux/miniSQL to solely Linux/*insert commercial database*. They want out of the NT world due to cost, stability, and security. But the major gripe they had with most of the DBs they had tried with Linux was that there were no tools to add tables, occasionally modify the schema, and do other administrative tasks from a Windows client. Currently, when the guy in the warehouse needs a table added he has to go talk to the Systems Programmers and have them write a Perl script to do it. They want to give him a way to add that table from a GUI so they can do other things and make his life easier. And no they don't want to write the GUI themselves.

    So here is my question:

    Which DB available for Linux has the best support for administration from a Windows GUI? They would also like the Linux box to handle authentication to the DB thru Samba. I told them that I wasn't sure if that was an samba issue of something that the DB vendors would handle. So I guess that's two questions then. ;)