MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle or Access?

Anon

Hi!

Just wondering. I'm starting a project and wonder what you think may be the best to use...

It'll involve quite a lot of inserts and some reads, at the start with up to 20 or so people using it concurrently. However, I want it expandible...

Somewhere in the region of 200-300 writes a day... and only 60/70 reads...
If it would be possible, to leave all records in the database... so your looking at about 60,000 a year... so looking for something which can deal with that over maybe 2-3 years before being archived. And it should be a fast searcher... even through that much data...

costing would be prefered low, but I'm sure I could get some sort of budget out of them...

What do you suggest?

Thanks,
Fintan

[deleted]

Access is never an option.

MySQL Postgres and Oracle can all do what you want (and about 10-100 times more than that)

If you have no personal preference then I'd advise postgres, because it is free and supports allmost the entire SQL92 standard.
MySQL is also free, but they think speed is more important than functionality.

PostgreSQL will let you do all the important SQL things and give good performance.

edwardsbc

Actually Vincent, even Absess ..er Access.. can handle that few hits. But I totally agree with you, if you have an option up-front, use a real database. Postgres and MySQL are good choices, as is Microsoft SQL if you happen to be in a M$ shop (already spent the money). I use'm all.

[deleted]

In my experience Abcess becomes... well... f*cking slow when you get to 50k records.

But then again, I try to stay away from it as much as I can so it may have improved since then.

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?

Time to YAPF!: http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

fintan

Thanks for those...

I just wanted to see your reaction on Access :-) I dont intend using that, but needed to show 'people in command' here that it wouldn't be viable... :-)

Anyway, I've used MySQL quite a bit before, but I just heard that it locks tables when inserting or updateing... and that PostgreSQL doesn't (locks rows only). and since we should be getting quite a few inserts/updates at the same time, I was wondering if there could be a problem?

would there be any reason to go Oracle or Sysbase or something like that??

Fintan

[deleted]

MySQL 3.x can only do table-level locking, which makes it unusable for a production environment. 4.x however does have row-level-locking, but is too new to be reliable.

Oracle and Informix are the best choices, but they cost more than my car and my car-stereo combined (and I am a bit of a freak in the audio dept)

If you start out by using PostgreSQL, you can see how it works out. If it does not do what you want, you can always consider porting to Oracle.

You can download an evaluation version of oracle to play around with (unlimited functionality but illegal to use for production) and see how it compares to postgreSQL.

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?

Time to YAPF!: http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

fintan

Thanks for the help everyone.

I'll let ye know how I get on...

Fintan