SourceForge’s discussion forums are a terrific way to connect with community members, get feedback, and help others with questions they have on a variety of topics. Someone recently asked some great questions about databases — let’s break it down a bit and also get thoughts on what you’d recommend.
Community member sarc1120 asks,
“I know Oracle 9i (DDL, DML, PL-SQL, triggers, stored procedures, administration, data modeling) and I would like something as similar as possible but open source and with a smaller footprint (less disk space in installation!). With so many to choose from I do not know where to start… I need remote access (maybe via a front end?) and the data is not much – less than 1GB. Performance is not an issue as usage is not intensive. Please can someone give me shortlist of the candidates?”
As sarc1120 says, when choosing a database, it’s hard to know just where to begin. This member is off to a good start however, by noting that there’s not much data to work with and remote access will be needed. Other important questions to ask include:
Will you need vendor support, or are you comfortable managing database issues on your own?
Do you have budget, or will solution need to be free?
Will it scale to grow with your needs?
Are there any hardware issue that will limit your choices?
Once you’ve answered these key questions, then you can begin to take a look at the options. As other community members already recommended, MySQL and PostgreSQL are two commonly used databases but, of course, there are many more.
Knoda is a database frontend for KDE that allows users to create, alter, and delete tables, define and use forms, and even write your own extensions using the integrated Python interpreter.
Kexi integrates directly into KDE and KOffice to provide data management. Use it to create database schemas, as well as insert, query and process data. Kexi can also be used without KDE on Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. Be sure to check out this article to learn more about using Kexi as an open source alternative to Microsoft Access.
Rekall is another alternative to MS Access that’s also integrated into KOffice. Technically not a database since it stores data elsewhere in an SQL server, it is a powerful tool that will let you extract and manipulate the data you have.
Firebird is a cross-platform relational database that fully supports stored procedures and triggers, dozens of thirds-party tools, and has a very small footprint. Firebird was also the winner of our 2007 Community Choice Awards for Best Project for the Enterprise.
Tell us about how you choose the right database for your needs.