Oracle, Sybase, Informix and even MS are recognizing the fact that the quality and scalability of freeware databases are increasing. To keep the gap between these two camps wide as possible these corporations are adding features and dropping prices like crazy. Its great to see. Because of the freeware DBs we are seeing a shake out of commercial DBs. Oracle for example has proven itself to have features and scalability that no freeware DB has yet. This same shake out is what we saw with web servers and web hosting. Companys like Verio (http://www.verio.com) are offering shared Oracle hosting allowing you to pay for only a subset of a oracle db without all the upfront costs or pains of Oracle SA and DBA work. I think we will see this with more databases and more service providers as database hosting becomes more of a commodity item. This is a goodway however to get your foot in the door if you need the power of a db like Oracle without all the costs.
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Oracle, Sybase, Informix and even MS are recognizing the fact that the quality and scalability of freeware databases are increasing. To keep the gap between these two camps wide as possible these corporations are adding features and dropping prices like crazy. Its great to see. Because of the freeware DBs we are seeing a shake out of commercial DBs. Oracle for example has proven itself to have features and scalability that no freeware DB has yet. This same shake out is what we saw with web servers and web hosting. Companys like Verio (http://www.verio.com) are offering shared Oracle hosting allowing you to pay for only a subset of a oracle db without all the upfront costs or pains of Oracle SA and DBA work. I think we will see this with more databases and more service providers as database hosting becomes more of a commodity item. This is a goodway however to get your foot in the door if you need the power of a db like Oracle without all the costs.