Data management products (was: How do you lock your web app data?)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <958j810o2e at news2.newsguy.com>,
Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
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>Others will no doubt disagree, but: when I need 'serialization' of
>"edits" by different users I also need atomic transactions and reliable
>recovery from errors.  A halfway-decent RDBMS gives me all of that
>for free, AND very handy primitives for all kinds of data access.
There are also a few people who agree with Alex.

This time, I'm one.
>
>For a non-heavy-load application under NT, I would use MSDE -- a freely
>redistributable version of the [small version of] Microsoft SQL Server
>engine, optimized for up to 5 simultaneous accesses; you can freely
>download it from the Microsoft site (you are legally licensed to
>redistribute it without limits IF you have a license for Microsoft
>Visual Studio products, or else its Office professional version --
>but IANAL, so, *do* check the details on Microsoft's site!) -- in
>fact you can download and use (but NOT redistribute) the Developer
>Edition of SQL Server, which in addition to that same engine has all
>the usual GUI tools for DB administration, tuning, etc -- but MSDE
>comes with a small packet of non-GUI tools which an old dinosaur like
>me finds perfectly OK (osql.exe to pump SQL commands into any ODBC
>compliant engine via commandline and/or textfiles, for example).
MSDE deserves to be more widely known.  I
think Alex's description merits reiteration.
>
>But there are other and freer RDBMS which one might prefer, if for
>any reason one wants to eschew MSDE -- Postgres which has been
>opensource forever, Interbase which has been opensourced a few
>months ago, the newest version/descendant of Adabas (I forget its
>current name) which is also going opensource, etc.  Just make sure
Adabas D, I think, is the one with a no-charge
"personal edition" for version 11.0.

Postgres is improving dramatically.  It's al-
ways been good, I mean; it's picking up a LOT
of new capabilities.

Actually, all these Alex has mentioned have
capabilities that'll knock the socks off vic-
tims habituated to Access, for example.
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		[more good and even
		important advice]
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-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html