Re: What is your favourite Linux or cross-platform database? (PostgreSQL)

[erix]

PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org/, see also http://wiki.postgresql.org/)

• BSD license ( ultra-free )
• the pgAdmin (gui) is nice enough; psql, the commandline client, is great.
• *very* active & helpful community; reported bugs often fixed within hours. There is often instant help at #postgresql / freenode.
• SQL:2011 ( see: SQL Conformance )
• ultrareliable: yes
• DBD::Pg (see: DBD::Pg )

Postgres is supported on a wide range of platforms (see the distributed buildfarm status page (which continually tests if compiling is still faultless) - not even all platforms are represented)

SQLite is only good for 1-person use, and then only with limited data size (the SQLite website honestly admits this). It is therefore IMHO not really a serious candidate for the epithet 'database', but YMMV, and you can see from the other replies that opinions vary wildly and widely. SQLite /is/ good for embedded use (which is a usage that postgres does offer).

update: Added mild SQLite bashing & some wordsmithing.

update (2012.10.27): s/SQL:2008/SQL:2011/g;

[Steve_BZ]

Hi Erix,

I guess I am being increasingly drawn to PostgreSQL, but I hadn't really considered SQLite until it came up in this discussion so prominently. I looked at the limits http://sqlite.org/limits.html, but they are really design limits, not data limits. For instance it doesn't seem to limit the number of rows in a table, just the number of columns. Have I got that right? And maybe the blob limit is a bit low if you want to embed videos or HiRes photos, but not if you just store a URI to the media which could be held in a directory.

I'd be interested in any other details you have.

As you see from my other posts I currently have Firebird, with DBD::InterBase, and the DBD just crashes too regularly for comfort.

Thanks.

Steve

[Anonymous Monk]

Per the 80/20 rule, I would go with SQLite for the majority case and then postgresql for the minority case. For the outlier 110+, Cassandra is looking good these days for NoSQL. For the majority NoSQL solution, I would vote for the module called y_serial at http://yserial.sourceforge.net -- definitely the easiest to implement, and fast in terms of development time. As for the BLOB issue, yserial seems to handle it well via compression. From a database performance perspective, you want BLOB under 2M, otherwise one is better off using files.