With your circumstances I'd expect that you already have a license to use (and possibly also to redistribute) the desktop edition of MS SQL Server, MSDE.

Despite its name, this is not a toy version! It gives you almost everything that the comes with the full version, but is limited to a max of 2GB of data and five concurrent sessions (it queues them, you wouldn't notice on a low transaction system). From memory I think it doesn't support all types of replication either.

I use DBI to interact with MSDE and so far I've not come across anything that was excessively problematic. I had to think about maximum sizes of binary columns to avoid truncation errors, but I count that as a good thing and didn't resent DBI for bringing the issue to my attention :)

I notice from your other comments that you are a little concerned about the ease of manipulating your data in memory, or perhaps more specifically about memory consumption while doing this manipulation.

My comment is that while storing 40MB (Abigail's estimate) in memory should not pose any problem, manipulating data in memory is something else altogether, particularly if you end up with data that is normalised.

Let SQL Server do this hard work on your behalf - it's not just about speed, and it's not just about transactions, it's also about suitability to task.

And in the current slowed IT market it doesn't hurt to add another marketable string to your bow.

And in case anyone wonders; No, I don't work for the evil empire. :)

In reply to Re: Selecting the right database for perl by EdwardG
in thread Selecting the right database for perl by TacoVendor

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