Database and DB management
From SME Guide
DBDesigner4
http://fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/
DBDesigner 4 is a visual database design system that integrates database design, modeling, creation and maintenance into a single, seamless environment. It combines professional features and a clear and simple user interface to offer the most efficient way to handle your databases. DBDesigner 4 compares to products like Oracle's Designer, IBM's Rational Rose, Computer Associates's ERwin and theKompany's DataArchitect but is an Open Source Project available for Microsoft Windows 2k/XP and Linux KDE/Gnome. It is release on the GPL. Starting from a reverse engineering engine to automatically retrieve a model from existing databases, extensive modeling tools and editors to a syncronisation function which will apply model changes automatically to the underlying database - it is all part of DBDesigner 4. DBDesigner 4 supports two switchable userinterfaces. The Design Mode is used to create and maintain the visual databases model. The Query Mode is used to work with table data and build complex SQL query statements for the use in PHP, Kylix or another programming language.
FirebirdSQL
http://www.firebirdsql.org FLOSSMETRICS link: http://melquiades.flossmetrics.org/projects/firebird FLOSSMETRICS quality evaluation: http://melquiades.flossmetrics.org/projects/firebird/quality
Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981. The Firebird Project is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000.
Ingres
http://www.ingres.com/products/ingres-database.php
Ingres Database is the open source database management system that can reduce IT costs and time to value while providing the strength and features expected from an enterprise class database. Ingres Database is a leader in supporting mission-critical applications and helping manage the most demanding enterprise applications of Fortune 500 companies. Focused on reliability, security, scalability, and ease of use, Ingres contains features demanded by the enterprise while providing the flexibility of open source. Core Ingres technology forms the foundation, not only of Ingres Database, but numerous other industry-leading RDBMS systems as well. Among the features: Sarbanes Oxley / HIPPA Compliancy - Ingres supports roles, role separation, and Kerberos authentication to meet the demands for increased data protection. Ingres also provides the robust auditing features many current regulations require to protect your sensitive data. Scalability: Large tables can be divided into partitions, based on range, a list of values or a hash value to improve performance. The table appears as a single entity to users, but access is improved by eliminating partitions for data retrieval. Ingres supports multiple levels of sub-partitions to give you the ability to design tables to match your usage requirements. Ingres Database also helps manage growing amounts of data in a cost-effective manner using a variety of compression algorithms. High Availability: Information in Ingres can be centrally located or distributed across geographically dispersed servers using sophisticated multi-master replication to provide high availability failover sites or workload distribution. Ingres can also run on clusters of servers, providing transparent high availability and as well as scalability benefits. Flexible Backup and Recovery: Data integrity is provided by transaction journaling and the ability to back up data online or offline. Recovery can be complete to a specific point in time for the entire database, or for a more confined set of data.
MySQL
The MySQL database has become the world's most popular open source database because of its consistent fast performance, high reliability and ease of use. It's used on every continent -- Yes, even Antarctica! -- by individual Web developers as well as many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software -- including industry leaders such as Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia, YouTube, and Zappos.com. Not only is MySQL the world's most popular open source database, it's also become the database of choice for a new generation of applications built on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python.) MySQL runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX, Netware, giving you the kind of flexibility that puts you in control. Among the features:
MySQL Enterprise Server 5.0 delivers new enterprise features, including:
- ACID Transactions to build reliable and secure business critical applications
- Stored Procedures to improve developer productivity
- Triggers to enforce complex business rules at the database level
- Views to ensure sensitive information is not compromised
- Information Schema to provide easy access to metadata
- Distributed Transactions (XA) to support complex transactions across multiple databases
- Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture for maximum flexibility
- Archive Storage Engine for historical and audit data
- Federated Storage Engine to create a single logical database from many physical servers
- Emergency Hot Fix Builds
PostgreSQL
http://www.postgresql.org/ FLOSSMETRICS link: http://melquiades.flossmetrics.org/projects/postgresql FLOSSMETRICS quality evaluation: http://melquiades.flossmetrics.org/projects/postgresql/quality
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation. An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data. PostgreSQL prides itself in standards compliance. Its SQL implementation strongly conforms to the ANSI-SQL 92/99 standards. It has full support for subqueries (including subselects in the FROM clause), read-committed and serializable transaction isolation levels. And while PostgreSQL has a fully relational system catalog which itself supports multiple schemas per database, its catalog is also accessible through the Information Schema as defined in the SQL standard. Data integrity features include (compound) primary keys, foreign keys with restricting and cascading updates/deletes, check constraints, unique constraints, and not null constraints. It also has a host of extensions and advanced features. Among the conveniences are auto-increment columns through sequences, and LIMIT/OFFSET allowing the return of partial result sets. PostgreSQL supports compound, unique, partial, and functional indexes which can use any of its B-tree, R-tree, hash, or GiST storage methods.
SAPDb/MaxDB
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/maxdb
MaxDB™ is the database management system developed and supported by SAP AG. It has its focus on the requirements of SAP customers and SAP applications and can be used as a less expensive alternative to databases from other vendors for your own or third-party applications as well. It is a competitive database management system for medium to large server configurations and also a convincing offering for a desktop or laptop database management system, as MaxDB is very easy to install and operate. The key benefits of MaxDB are its many built-in self-administering features. MaxDB is available for the most prominent operating system/hardware platforms Microsoft Windows, Linux, and UNIX. Today we count more than 10000 SAP customers running MaxDB and liveCache installations, proving MaxDB's reliability, scalability and availability for configurations of all sizes. MaxDB is also widely used within SAP, for example for the Service Marketplace, the documentation development in Knowledge Warehouse, and also SDN recently was migrated to MaxDB. SDN currently is one of the largest SAP NetWeaver Portal implementation with over 600,000 named users, and it runs on MaxDB and Linux-x64.
SymmetricDS
SymmetricDS is web-enabled, database independent, data synchronization/replication software. It uses web and database technologies to replicate tables between relational databases in near real time. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outage. By using database triggers, SymmetricDS guarantees that data changes are captured and atomicity is preserved. Support for database vendors is provided through a Database Dialect layer, with implementations for MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, HSQLDB, and Apache Derby included. Synchronization can be configured to push data (trickle-back) or pull data (trickle-poll) at an interval. SymmetricDS allows for 2-tier and even n-tier synchronization.
