Cameron Laird's personal notes on data management

• RDBMS [Explain ACIDity, SQL-92, ....]
  • I'm still trying to figure out if Caché deserves attention.
  • DB2 [offers single admin image for clustered servers]
  • D3
  • Gadfly: Alex Martelli literately lauds Gadfly, and we also wrote an article on its capabilities.
  • Informix
  • Ingres
  • InterBase: Mozilla Public License 1.1; nicely mature, with efficient query parser and seek algorithms; not so hot for multi-user; available for Linux, Win*, Solaris (not all same code?);
  • MaxSQL combines MySQL and Berkeley DB;
  • mSQL
  • MySQL: very fast at light loads; no transactions; simplistic table-locking; not close to SQL-92; no server-side cursors, no stored procedures, no SQL views
  • Oracle [explain good and bad]
  • Paradox
  • PostgreSQL: not SQL-92 yet, also no declarative referential integrity and outer joins until 7.0; shared cache gives good multi-user performance. I'm thinking of writing a long description of the prospects for replication.
  • SQL Server [federates; relatively difficult management for large installations]
  • Sybase
  • Titanium
  • Visual FoxPro
  LinuxCare has a serious-looking comparison of the leading RDBMSs. I haven't yet studied it enough to vouch for its accuracy.
• LDAP
• in-memory and other embeddable
  • db.linux
  • dbm
  • gdbm ... Bindings are available for many languages, including Tclgdbm [Qgdbm]
  • kdb is written in K
  • MetaKit
  • Microsoft thing
  • TclVSdb ... an associated forms package called TclVSForm