Dan,
As far as open source databases go mySQL and Postgres are the two contenders. mySQL is great if you aren't worried about transaction (most applications are), but if you want to query this using select (rather than delete, insert, update) most of the time then it can be good. A web site is a great example of when mySQL might be ideal. Infrequent additions to the database and high through put of reads.
On the other hand Postgres manages transactions for you so you get slower reads (and writes) but everything can be kept consistent.
Postgres and Oracle are broadly comparable. Clearly you have to pay for Oracle (although development licences are free I think). I don't have any benchmarks to hand, but I'm sure the Oracle marketing machine would have you believe that Oracle gives a better performance.
As far as how difficult they are to install - I've installed Oracle and it was fairly simple. I've no experience installing either of the other two. One thing to bear in mind when installing Oracle - by default it assumes the computer will be dedicated to it. If this isn't the case then you will have to tweak a few things to get it to behave itself and stop using all the memory.
Chris.
Originally posted by Dan Jackson:
Hello,
I am planning on setting up a database server. I am wondering what the best solution maybe. This going to be very small scale running on a P200 /w 128meg, and i am planning on only about 50 user hits a day.
I have some idea of my options:
-BSD/unix, win2k/XP RC1
-mySQL, oracle
-tomcat, iSuites
I do have unix experiance (but never setup a server), i heard mySQL is not very good, and i dont want to use access. From experiance how hard is it to setup tomcat/oracle on unix?
Thank you for your time.
