From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Sep 16 12: 0:19 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom0-217.telepath.com [216.14.0.217]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4237337B422 for ; Sat, 16 Sep 2000 12:00:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 97219 invoked by uid 100); 16 Sep 2000 18:59:38 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14787.49946.294909.137943@guru.mired.org> Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 13:59:38 -0500 (CDT) To: Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Which DB In-Reply-To: <125367162@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG keith@mail.telestream.com writes: > A bit of DB confussion for me that I'd like to have cleared up if someone > cares to respond. > What is the difference between SQL, MSQL, MySQL? And which one is the most > widely used? SQL is the name of the language you use to talk to the database. MicroSoft, in their usual fashion, calls their SQL database product "SQL Server". They bought it from Sybase. There are a number of other free choices for SQL servers. See the catalog of free database systems at for a list. mSQL and MySQL are the most popular free database systems. I believe MySQL is the more popular of the two, as mSQL development went through a hiatus at one time. However, neither of them supports transactions. This means you either limit yourself to simple applications, or spend a lot of time worrying about the concurrency issues a database is supposed to solve for you. Personally, I use postgresql, but there are other good free solutions that support transactions. Since some of them appeared after I chose postgresql, it wouldn't surprise me if I would think they were better than postgresql at this point. Again, see the free database list. There are also reports that the demo/developer versions the commercial database vendors have released for Linux work very well under the emulator, but the restrictions on them made them unsuitable for my purposes. Thanx,