RDBMS
Here are some databases which I've used on course of web development. My opinions are strictly based on personal experience.
For each of these, I'll be adding code samples soon.
Oracle
Oracle is a feature rich, well tested ORDBMS available from
Oracle Corporation
.
It runs on a variety of platforms including Linux and Windows.
It is expensive, quite complex and ideal for tasks which require
extremely good performance, data integrity, scalability and
outside help!
Pros
- Fast - if you've powerful hardware and sensible DBAs
- Support
- Tools and utilities
- Transaction support
- Object relational model (since v8.0)
- Almost all features you ever want in any database system
Cons
- Complexity
- Expense
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a free and fast ORDBMS available from PostgreSQL
.
It is very powerful and well supported by the community. Most Linux distributions
contain PostgreSQL.
Pros
- Fast
- Free
- Small memory requirements
- Lot of information available on the net
- Supports transactions
- Will soon support integrity constraints
- Object relational capability
Cons
- Nothing I can think off
MySQL
MySQL is a free and fast RDBMS available from MySQL
.
It runs on a variety of platforms including Linux and Windows. It is simple,
extremely fast and is ideal for serving web pages.
Pros
- Fast
- Free
- Very small memory requirements
- Lot of information available on the net
Cons
- No support for transactions
- No rollback
FileMaker Pro
I've used FileMaker Pro
on WindowsNT,
briefly. It is reasonably fast and powerful enough - fills the gap between desktop
databases like MS Access and enterprise databases like Oracle 8 - quite
nicely. These are only my first impressions.
Pros
- Fast
- Small memory requirements
- Extremely easy to use GUI and web companions
Cons
- No support for transactions
- No rollback
- Oversimplified - so not very powerful