Linux and Closed Source Databases

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.

Comments

Certainly Filled With Pros and Cons

[Christopher B. Brown]

• 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.

This article is FUNNY!

[Bruce Perens]

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

What about Sybase?

[fence]

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