We look at eight Linux databases, ranging from pure open source projects to offerings from Oracle and IBM, as well as a few “hybrid” commercially supported and enhanced open source products.
We’ve all heard the story about the system administrator who snuck Linux into his organization through the back door and quietly started running Apache, Sendmail, or SAMBA. While that still happens in IT organizations all the time, nowadays you’re just as likely to hear a story about a manager who brought Linux into his organization through the front door, with the intention of using it as a departmental database server.
In many ways, this is part of the natural evolution of Linux. For example, as the Web has evolved, the static-page driven Web sites of yesterday have given way to newer dynamically-generated Web sites. In order to drive dynamic Web sites, as well as e-commerce and application server environments, a strong back-end database system is vital. And since Apache running on Linux is the most widely used Web server platform, you can see why the traditional database vendors have been making major efforts to support Linux.
A wide range of database products is available for the Linux platform. There are a number of open source databases, some of which are very basic and are designed only to handle single-user information (such as storing your MP3 playlists or personal contact information). Others (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL) have…
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