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Databases Give
You the Power
A database is a collection of data, which
is categorized in some way. The data has to be quickly accessible
and modifiable for optimal categorization. Relational databases
are the most commonly used databases. Data in them is placed
in tables and they are accessed usually with SQL (Structured
Query Language). The are many different types of databases from
proprietary one like Oracle to free ones like MySQL. Databases
are the heart of dynamic Web pages. All dynamic Web pages must
get their information from a database.
MVI Solutions will provide
your business with the database solution you need.
More About Databases
Below is a partial list of some of the more popular databases.
Please Note, in addition to the listings below, many of the commercial database vendors have free "personal edition" or "single user" policies that allow their products to be used free of charge at home or in non-commercial applications. The goal of these policies is to allow users to evaluate their software free-of-charge, and to allow developers to port their applications without making a large financial investment.
McKoi SQL Database
The McKoi SQL Database is written entirely in Java. Supports transactions, referential integrity, triggers, indexes, Java-specific enhancements. This database supports multi-threaded, multi-client operation and is embedded. Released under the GPL license. This is probably the most advanced open-source pure-Java database out there.
SAP DB
The SAP DB is the liberation, under the GPL/LGPL license, of the SAP AG database. This is a major enterprise-class database.
HypersonicSQL
Hsql is a small, (100KB) fast, embeddable relational DB written entirely in Java. Supports only a subset of the SQL standard. A 'stable' version is now available. Modified BSD license.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a powerful and complete SQL implementation that rivals commercial databases such as Oracle. This database (along with MySQL) is the leading GPL'ed database system for the GNU/Linux & BSD platforms. Commercial support is available from a company formed by the leading Postgres developers.
This database is fully Transactional, with full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties. There are seven different levels of locking for consistent queries and updates. Tremendous performance improvements in Version 7.0 Support for Triggers Support for user defined data types. Support for stored procedures. These can be defined in a variety of ways, including an internal language, or very generally as a shared library, written in any language, linked into the Postgres server. Includes Online Backups, Multiple index type (b-tree, hash, etc.), Commercial ODBC drivers from OpenLink, Non-commercial ODBC drivers. The Postgres HOWTO provides an extensive reference for a large number of Postgres facts and tools.
MySQL
MySQL from MySQL AB is, with Postgres, one of the most popular GPL'ed databases for the GNU/Linux and BSD platforms.
Commercial sales, support and training is available from NuSphere. They also do contract programming and infrastructure enhancements and feature additions for MySQL. Includes commercial support from AbriaSoft. Rudimentary support for table locking recently added. Also has complex but powerful user access control mechanism. Multi-threaded for parallel queries Includes ODBC, Perl, C, Java, Tcl, Python API's
InterBase
The InterBase FireBird SQL server from InterBase Corp. is the well-known InterBase database released under an open source (MPL) license. In case you are wondering why you haven't heard of InterBase before, note that they were recently spun off from Inprise, which is, of course, the new name for Borland.
CQL++
Machine Independent Software offers the CQL++ DBMS. Originally developed originally as a full-featured commercial software product, it is currently available under several licenses, including the GNU GPL. (The free version is under GPL, non-free, non-GPL versions are available at reasonable cost.) The feature list mentions the following:
Transaction support, including commit, rollback, nested transactions, logging, failure recovery. ANSI 1989 Level 2 SQL and ODBC Level 1 API support ISAM or B-tree access Unlimited number of cursors BLOB (Binary Large Object) Support
Optimistic con currency control with shared read locks. This database has a preprocessor for embedding SQL in C++.
Gadfly
Gadfly is a small, portable database system written entirely in python and specifically intended for python programmers. Database files are portable from Win95 to Linux. Source code freely available, and is commercially supported by Chordate Systems.
GigaBASE and FastDB
GigaBASE (US Mirror) and FastDB (US Mirror) are memory & file-based databases with an SQL-like query language. Because they compile into an application, they avoid most of the DB management problems of client-server. BSD-like license.
Commercial SQL Databases
There are a large number of database vendors that support Linux. It is difficult to review these accurately in a small space, yet, based on some highly subjective criteria, I've attempted just that. As you shop for a database, you should make your own list of the features and functions that you believe are important for your application.
Remember that the "best" database is not necessarily the one with the greatest number of features, or the lowest price. For your needs, it may be raw performance for small queries, or it may be ease of administration of a database with tens of millions of records. Remember that whichever database you choose, you will be living with it for many years.
This section (of commercial databases) is no longer actively maintained. After all of the 'big boys' announced availability on Linux in 1998, so did everyone else, and it has become impossible/impractical to attempt to list all of the commercial databases available for Linux.
MimerSQL
Mimer SQL is unique in that it focuses on providing a small-footprint database suitable for embedding into applications. Includes drivers for ODBC, JDBC, ESQL API's. Runs on most Unix's, as well as Windows and OpenVMS.
Cache
Cache is a "multi-dimensional data engine", based on ANSI MUMPS, and thus popular in the medical world. Includes a SQL interfaces, ODBC drivers and an Apache web module.
DBMaker
DBMaker is a full-fledged commercial database. A sample of the features include:
Two-phase commit transactions Triggers, stored procedures, user defined functions.
BLOB's, full-text search engine Foreign Keys online full and incremental backup, journalism. privilege management on table columns, stored procedures. OLTP
IBM DB2
IBM has announced availability and support for the DB2 for Linux database. The DB2 Universal Database is the flagship database: it boasts a long track record of large installations and rich & powerful features. Interesting twists include: Free download of trial beta User support via a news forum. Includes the Web Control Center, a graphical database administration tool. Includes net.data multi-database access and web programming API's.
Ingres
Computer Associates has announced the availability of its Ingres II database on Linux in 4Q98. It is currently available for beta testing.
Oracle
Oracle 8 and 8.1 database products are now available on Linux.
Informix
Informix, now a division of IBM, has been offering a variety of its products on the Linux operating system for years. In particular, the SE Standard Engine database, ESQL/C and Connect are available on Linux as supported products. Free evaluation versions are available. Informix-SE is a high-quality, powerful and feature-rich SQL database aimed at folks looking for a low-maintenance, easy-to-administer database.
The International Informix User Group Software Repository contains a wide selection of goodies in source form. There is a listing of Informix-on-Linux HOWTO's, which includes installation, configuration, compiling & more. The Informix on Linux page provides general hints and suggestions.
INXUTIL
The International Electronic Magazine for Informix Software Users provides a forum of advocacy for Informix on Linux, including the now obsolete, but priceless Open Letter. See also the SQLFlex from InfoFlex listing below. They market an Informix-compatible database.
Sybase
Sybase is now offering Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) in the form of a free, unsupported release for Linux, for both development and deployment. Besides a raft of flagship-product capabilities, Sybase currently holds the world TPM/C speed record on a non-clustered SMP box. Sybase also offers the OpenClient/C libraries in free, unsupported form. These libraries allow Linux clients to connect to Sybase server products. They are available in the old a.out binary format, the ELF binary format and the ELF dynamically loadable format.
There are various Open Source tools for Sybase:
- The Sybperl Sybase OpenClient extensions to Perl.
- The SQSH SQL Shell for Unix provides a powerful interface for Sybase databases.
- Sybase FAQ The Web/Genera web-to-Sybase interface.
SOLID
The SOLID SQL Server is available from Solid Information Technology Ltd. These folks are interesting to look at for a number of reasons: they offer a free evaluation copy, they claim support on Linux SMP, and they provide clients for non-Linux systems that can talk to Linux servers. Taking the enterprise-computing viewpoint, Solid is particularly interesting because it provides a number of the features required in an industrial strength database.
Online Backups, allow a consistent snapshot of the database to be taken without taking the server off-line. Also allows recovery to last committed transaction after power failure, using a fast roll-forward from the last checkpoint. Role privileges: users can be given password-protected privileges to delete, insert, update and/or select. Query Optimization, with ability to audit optimization statistics. BLOb support (Binary Large Objects) Versioning and pessimistic and optimistic con currency control, including SHARED, INTENT and EXCLUSIVE locking.
New: The Free Linux SOLID Desktop Campaign is promoting a two-connection version of the server. Third Party Tools for SOLID -- Perl, python, ODBC, JDBC, Tcl, and much more.
Empress
Empress provides the EmpSQL database as well as a variety of add-on products, including Motif-based clients. Some EmpSQL features that caught my eye: Transaction Check-pointing and Rollback Two-Phase Commit BLOb support (Binary Large Objects). Includes "Host Language" C bindings that sidestep the performance overhead introduced by SQL parsers. Foreign Key is supported for referential integrity product overview Personal Empress for Linux Empress Web HTML Toolkit.
Adabas D
Adabas D from Software AG can be obtained from Caldera, S.u.S.E GmbH and S.u.S.E LLC; S.u.S.E. offer support contracts. The feature list rattles off the following: Multi-threaded, Multi-server Disk mirroring for fault tolerance Synchronized Replicas Multiple SQL Dialects, incl. ANSI, Oracle, DB2 BLOBs Optimistic Locking A Menu-driven database administration tool supports: Wide variety of performance statistics Tracing, Logging Backup
Velocis Database Server
Raima's Velocis Database Server is a client/server SQL database engine that is built into thousands of commercial applications. It offers multiple API's, including an ANSI SQL C-API, a low-level C-API, C++ class libraries, and a custom API through Server Extensions. Velocis supports the relational database model and the pointer-based network database model, but for flexibility and performance, developers can combine these two database models. The Server Extension feature allows application code to be hosted directly on the database server, reducing network traffic.
mSQL
The MiniSQL database from Hughes Technologies provides a simple, fast database that supports a subset of SQL. This is a popular, solid, widely used database and is superb for basic database applications. It comes with an extensive set of freeware tools, language bindings (e.g. Java, Perl, Tcl/tk), monitors, web interfaces, ODBC, JDBC bindings. It is packaged as shareware, and the current version comes in source code form. Its principal drawback is its lack of support for the industrial strength features such as transaction support and multi-tasking.
Kubl
The Kubl Home Page describes a "High Performance, Compact DBMS Server [and] Replication Server [with] ODBC Client API, SQL and Stored Procedures [support]". It runs on NT and most Unix's. Includes Replication / Hot Sparing / Online Backups Automatic Checkpoints / Recovery to last committed transaction Role privileges for different users.
- Multi-threaded, makes use of SMP SAG/CLI C Language interfaces for Unix.
- BLOB support non-locking historical read-only pessimistic exclusive/non-exclusive concurrency controls OO features, such as table inheritance, row id's, variable length vector data in columns, dynamically bound data types, etc.
- "Kubl/PL", an internal programming (stored procedure) language.
- ODBC driver for Windows NT.
YARD-SQL
YARD Software GmbH offers YARD-SQL. This appears to be a high-end package, with a large variety of features; among them an X11/Motif interface. Some randomly selected features: X11/Motif interfaces ODBC support NLS National Language Support Query Optimizer Integrity constraints Stored procedures, Triggers Personal Edition (free for non-commercial use)
JustLogic
The SQL Relational Database System from JustLogic Technologies. Their feature list should be consulted for details; some features that caught my eye are: Transaction Support (Two Phase Commit) Automatic rollback after hardware/software/power failure.
Cost-Based Optimizer FrontBase has many supported features.
DBIX
Halcyon Software is known for its Windows-Unix cross platform tools. It offers the DBIX SQL database. Some salient features: Data Recovery Transaction Logging Full ANSI SQL compliance ODBC Interfaces Visual Basic (VBIX) interoperability
Texis
The Texis database from Thunderstone specializes in support for natural language text, images, video and audio.
Linter
The Linter SQL Server from Relex-US Ltd. Demo versions can be downloaded from the News page. RelexUS provides commercial support in the US for this Russian product.
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