Hi, Philip!I always like everything what you do! Just one little correction:
some times ago I've done one test with INFORMIX-OnLine v.722 on the middle HP station and I've got 8.000-9.000 insert/sec with total size 10.000.000 rows (2Gb) I've done it for one company, that was disespired to find any RDBMS capable to keep 1.000 insert/sec... So, they are happy with Informix :) It's not a publicity! Only information.
Good Luck in all what you do!
Dimitri.
-- KRAVTCHUK Dimitri, August 5, 1997
Phil, I enjoyed your thread/perspective on RDBMS. My experience only extends from intial RDBMS with the AS/400 (2 + yrs worth), to present with SQL Server 6.0, and I've found (and found very quickly) that as an application developer, once you get involved with writing efficient stored procs & triggers and test/tune them to your app, the performance issue is nearly non-existant, even when 50 + users and getting in the way. I perform alot of my CS testing at home, using version 6.0, but the tuning aspects have been validated once they're in the production environment. Unfortunately, like everything else with Micosoft, you have to dig this stuff up yourself, as rarely does anyone volunteer the info, either via ignorance or selfishness.
-- Mark Mitchell, November 16, 1997
Very informative site, and quite helpful in covering those 'philosophical' points that are so often missing. Being a data base newbie I found the whole database selection / installation issue quite intimidating, but lucked out with my eventual choice, the Solid Server from Solid Technologies at http://www.solidtech.com/ . I realize you don't have room to adequately discuss the bejillions of alternative database engines, but in my experience the Solid server has lived up to all it's claims. I was able to get it downloaded, installed, and running in one afternoon, having never even touched a database before. Even while I was debugging the CGI code and force feeding it wretched SQL it never crashed and to date has not ever hiccuped or crashed even once, after about 6 months of abuse. The P-90 it is running on barely notices it. And, in contrast to most all db vendors, they do publish the price, including making a version of it free for Linux.No, I don't work for Solid or get a promotional fee :}. I offer this comment as a suggestion for others who need a reliable, in-expensive commercial db engine that can be stood up and managed by a first timer.
R.
-- Russ Gritzo, March 18, 1998
What about the gratis/Free/low-cost databases such as PostgresSQL, mySQL and mSQL? What's the received wisdom on PHP3?Are any of these suitable for a production-quality call handling/support database system with a web front end? What sort of hardware would be necessary to run this reasonably for 10-20 users?
-- Alex Butcher, June 22, 1998
What about the gratis/Free/low-cost databases such as PostgresSQL, mySQL and mSQL? What's the received wisdom on PHP3? OK, PostgreSQL = full featured but heavy. Think of it as a full size truck. Totally free. A bonus: AOLserver (www.aolserver.com) which all of Phil's examples are written for, claims to support it. They have recently added much more support for the SQL standard. MySQL = cheap, lightweight, very fast. Think Saab 900 Turbo. However it does not have all the features of PostrgreSQL - for instance, it cannot do subselects. No AOLserver driver either. mSQL = people tend to be moving away from this to MySQL. PHP3 is getting closer to being wonderful. Currently it is very well supported, very active development, very widely used. Version 3 added support for persistent DBMS connections, which increases speed and reduces the overhead of starting a DB connection for each DB operation.
Are any of these suitable for a production-quality call handling/support database system with a web front end? What sort of hardware would be necessary to run this reasonably for 10-20 users? Check out PTS and Keystone at http://www.stonekeep.com/ . PTS is FREE, Keystone is free only up to a certain number of users. 10-20 users: P133, 32MB RAM, Linux.
-- Patrick Giagnocavo, July 4, 1998
Sybase also has a full-text "plug-in" for Verity. I used it to set up full text searching at a site operated by John Wiley and Sons.
-- John Hinsdale, April 11, 1999
Phil (as a lot of authors do) forgot to mention InterBase as a viable choice. Unlike those big guys, they have the order form right on the Web site: http://www.interbase.com/cgi/ordering.cgi. As for tech support - people at IB are constantly monitoring newsgroups answering user questions.
-- Sergey Kazachenko, April 20, 1999
Speaking of fast and consistent backups: you may wish to check out NetApp high-performance file servers (now you have to put down all that money you have been saving for buying a Porsche):http://www.netapp.com/technology/apps.html
Briefly, these boxes are rackmounted PC-like servers running proprietary operating system with really fast NFS operations and snapshots (complete filesystem images, done in single transaction).
Specific page on using Oracle with NetApp filers is at
http://www.netapp.com/technology/level3/3023.html
-- Dmitry Kohmanyuk, July 17, 1999
More info about NetApps (http://www.netapp.com/):They don't run a proprietary operating system; they run NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/) with a totally wickedly cool proprietary filesystem. They used to run on Intel Pentium 75 CPUs(!), but nowadays they all are based on Alpha chips (they're essentially PC-class machines).
Here are some of the reasons you want to buy one:
1. The filesystem is one of the primary reasons you want to buy one of these puppies. You can grow and shrink the filesystem while it's still in use! Any other RAID solution will require you to repartition when adding/removing drives.
2. It also does snapshots of the filesystems at customizable intervals. Just deleted an important file? No problem - there is a hidden ".snapshot" directory in every directory from where you can retrieve your file. Are you about to do something to your files that you might regret? No problem - do a manual snapshot first.
3. Worried about network throughput? They've got gigabit ethernet adapters and adapters with 4 100Base-TX ports on them.
4. They've got fail-over clustering support. Basically, you hook two NetApps together with special clustering cards which monitor the NetApps. If one fails, the other NetApp automatically grabs the failed NetApp's MAC address and everything continues smoothly. This is very clever design, as it allows NetApp to sell 2 filers and the clustering cards; this design can easily cost over $100,000.
5. Works with NFS and CIFS (windows networking) so it works well in a mixed UNIX/Windows environment.
Of course, none of this comes cheap; these filers (700-series) start in the tens of thousands of dollars range.
If you're looking for a super-redundant version of the Netapp in a single box, check out Auspex (http://www.auspex.com/). They don't have as many cool features as NetApp, but they are completely redundant, so you can blast it with a shotgun, and chances are it'll keep going.
And no, I don't work for them. I'm just a very satisfied sysadmin-consultant who was fortunate enough to actually have his client listen to him when he said "Buy a NetApp!". :)
-- Richard Hwang, August 13, 1999
My, how things have changed. MySQL and SQLite are free and are major players. Web accessible documentation is available as well. All this in a very short time.
-- Stephen Holland, July 22, 2009