[TriLUG] Free SQL DB options for Linux

Michael Alan Dorman mdorman at debian.org
Wed May 8 19:18:29 EDT 2002


Chris Hedemark <chris at yonderway.com> writes:
> On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 18:32, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> > And if you think you don't need transaction support, you're probably
> > better off using BerkeleyDB. :-)
> 
> Many applications won't make use of it even when it is there (like lots
> of the PHP stuff floating around on Freshmeat).

Well, I was going more for the "gently sarcastic remark regarding
things that don't have ACID semantics", rather than any real
rejoinder. :-)

I was an early adopter of MySQL---coming off the breathtakingly
primitive mSQL---and at that time, Postgres95 wasn't anywhere near
ready for prime time.

But for the last two years I've used PostgreSQL pretty much
exclusively, and as I do more database programming, I've come to
realize that if you think you don't need transactions, then you're
probably not working hard enough at keeping your data consistent.

There's a lot of people out there writing code that has "interesting"
corner cases if one part of a pair of related tuples in different
tables gets updated and the other doesn't.

Better to just let the database handle it.

Mike.



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