Appendix C: Common Database Platforms

This appendix offers an overview of some common database platforms for enterprise and “personal” use. Most popular databases today can be considered relational or object-relational in nature, and they support SQL. When choosing a database platform, price, market sector, interoperability, and scalability are sometimes the deciding factors over features.

Enterprise Databases

There are a few heavy-hitters in the database world, including the key players in the enterprise relational database management system (RDBMS) market listed here. The following list of vendors is not intended to be comprehensive, but to give an overview of the various approaches to solving the problems of a large, distributed enterprise.

Oracle

Historically, Oracle is the granddaddy of them all. In 1979, Oracle Corporation released the first commercially viable RDBMS, based on the work of Dr. E. F. Codd. In 1983, however, the true power and cross-platform capabilities of Oracle were evident when the source code for Oracle was rewritten in the C language, making Oracle extremely portable across any hardware and software platform that has a C compiler.

As a database, Oracle9i has become “unbreakable.” All market hype aside, so much redundancy and failover capability has been built into the product that Oracle has a written guarantee that your database won’t go down!

What really distinguishes Oracle from many of its competitors is its availability on so many operating systems and hardware platforms. Products like Microsoft SQL Server run strictly on Windows operating systems with Intel hardware, and many of the other potential contenders run on only Windows or Linux or a combination of the two.

Many independent benchmark tests of Oracle versus its competitors, such as the March 26, 2002, PC Magazine review of SQL databases, show Oracle to be one of the key market leaders.

More information about Oracle9i can be found at http://oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/oracle9i/index.html.

IBM DB2/UDB

IBM DB2/UDB had its humble beginnings as a mainframe database, but has now grown to be implemented on almost as many hardware and software platforms as Oracle. The strengths of DB2 lie in its strong text-search capabilities, on par with the Oracle Text product. The integration with its WebSphere middleware product also makes it a good all-in-one enterprise solution, although the WebSphere product can be used with an Oracle database as the back-end.

More information about DB2/UDB can be found at http://www-3.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb.

Sybase

Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise finds its strengths in its financial application suites, but it is also on par, feature for feature, with similar products from IBM and Oracle. The SQLAnywhere product suite is crafted for small workgroups as well as embedded and mobile applications.

More information on Sybase products can be found at http://www.sybase.com/products.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server picked up where Sybase left off at version 6, when Microsoft and Sybase broke their development ties, although SQL Server has diverged quite a bit from Sybase’s products. SQL Server’s dependence on the Windows operating system and Intel hardware as a host rule it out as a choice for enterprises that rely on Unix and non-Intel hardware for their base infrastructure.

More information about Microsoft SQL Server can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver.