What is the best free relational database for ubuntu?
 

What is the best free relational database for ubuntu? In my previous life, I was a SQL Server programmer. I have a project that I would like to do but no longer have access to a windows machine.

mysql? postgresql?

Certainly I would think mysql or postgresql would be the top 2 free ones. Mysql is the most common. In the past I liked postgresql because it supported stored procedures and mysql didnt...but then...mysql implemented them and I never looked back to postgresql. Mysql apparently has better performance than postgresql.

That's all I know. :)

I am a MS SQL Server programmer/admin too. I think mysql compares very well to the basic package of ms sql server and with other add-ons to mysql you can do the xml stuff too.

C

Also, tell us more about your project and the type of data used. If you are planning on doing some sort of text search engine you dont want a relational database...you want berkeley db (now sleepycat), it's a name/value type of database (using btree's) and makes doing a text search engine easy peasy.

Gee, it's great to have smart friends.

I am a collector of Old Time Radio Shows. I have 70 to 80 thousand of them (there are another 40,000 or so out there). There is a tremendous amount of information about them. They are mostly little 7mb files that I keep on an external 1tb drive.

My old SQL Server DB stored a hot-link to each of the files along with name, size, running time, actors, sampling rate and whether or not I had listened to it. Another set of tables contained data about the shows.

I used an Access front-end so that I could peruse the various listings and could listen to and comment about each episode. It worked pretty well but was not "quite right" so I dumped the app when I dumped Windows.

I am now retired and have some time. I would like to take another shot at building a good system on a Linux machine. I am using the latest version of Ubuntu (9.04?).

Nice application! It would be great if you offered this on some sort of web site.

I just read about a linux program that is probably perfectly suited to this type of "collections database". GCStar is one that may work for you. I saw the perfect thing in a Linux magazine today that handles meta data for any sort of collection you have from cds to baseball cards to stamps but I can't remember it now. If you go to the bookstore and look through the linux mags you would probably find it or something similar.

Basically, you should see what free software is out there that can handle what you want. Linux is the best for that sort of thing and handling collections is a very common activity for computer users. Google things like "top linux apps" or peruse through the synaptics package manager in ubuntu for cool apps.

Also, you could probably port your access application to Linux easily using an Access compatible program. Kexi is one such application. You can find more by searching "Access" in the synaptics package manager.

Colin

Free as in freedom or free as in no cost? Because if it's as in no cost Sybase has a freebie version for Linux.
http://response.sybase.com/forms/ASE_Linux_Download

Microsoft SQL Server 4.21 was actually just the DOS/Windows fork of Sybase, way back when... 1994ish.

MysQL might be a good choice, but if Oracle acquires its copyrights its future may be limited. You might want to look at Firebird as an alternative, or one of the other suggestions. (For speed, if that's a consideration, SQLite is a good way to go, but you need to be able to write C or C++ code.)

If your objective is to get a working app, then guru_stpetebeach's suggestion might be the way to go. On the other hand, if your objective is to make your retirement more interesting, then writing your app from scratch makes more sense. :)

Come to think of it, Microsoft SQL Server's release coincided with the release of NT 3.51, which is probably the only reason they didn't call it 4.20. ;) It ran on Novell NetWare too, but not under DOS or Windows for Workgroups. Just for the record...

I played with Firebird which came bundled with Mandriva Powerpack and it seemed fairly capable. I really hate MySQL though and PostgreSQL is just weird -- I don't vacuum databases and object-oriented tables are a nightmare.

This all looks like great advise. I hope I figured out the thank-you properly. Anyway, thank you all!

I was back in the bookstore and took at a look at that magazine. The application was Data Crow:
http://www.datacrow.net/

Looks like a nice app. It has an optional web component. Works with imdb too. It is also customizable by modules.

C