[geeks] Careeer shifting

[joshua d boyd]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 11:21:27AM -0400, Wolfgang Engelien wrote:
> Except for playing with mSQL and programming a
> little bit in Paradox I have no database experience.
> I am currently looking for some free database
> software for our lab and did find OVRIMOS. Did
> anybody hear or work with them before?
> (http://www.ovrimos.gr)

Trying to look at their web site.  What does your lab do by the way?

Postgres has long been on the cutting edge of Object Relation
technology.  My understanding is that CA Ingres is a commercial branch of
of the Postgres base (from back before Postgres knew SQL), and a database
called Illustra (which got rolled into Informix to my understanding) was
also a branch off from Postgres.

For scientific useage, Postgres has many prewritten datatypes.  For
instance, there are GIS (and plain geometry) datatypes that make it
almost easy to query large geometry databases.  There are also all sorts
of biology datatypes (which I don't really understand), and it even
understands IP numbers as a native datatype. 

Also, Postgres is pretty well proven to be "safe" to my understanding, and
it was the first free database to support transactions (and they been
supporting them for as long as Postgres has been free to my
understanding).  Anyway, Postgres might not have as much high end
scalability as some business's might like, and it isn't quite as easy to
get going as MySQL is (although it isn't particularly hard), but it is
still worth a look in my opinion, and it runs pretty nicely on older
hardware.

And not finally the Ovrimos web site has loaded, so I shall have to check
it out.  Hmm, it looks decent, but I don't see anything that makes it
stand out.  They license per connection, which I always found a pain,
especially if they are going to try and say that you need an unlimited
license for web serving.

BTW, does anyone else find it annoying that if you throttle back IIS to
only allow 10 database connections, that still Microsoft maintains that
you need the unlimited connection web server license for an extra 3
Grand?  A company I worked with was looking at coloing an NT server, until
they found that out.  That broke their meager budget, and resulted in a
lot of extra work to make the software work on a more normal account.  And
they just didn't want to even hear about linux.  Bleh.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd