Searching through my pile of news and magazines, I was reading a lot about databases this weekend. I work with Oracle, but I try to keep up on events in the other DBs' worlds so I can see what's coming down the pipe or starting to catch up. It got me wondering about what the monks out there see. A few questions you can choose to answer just to see what's out there:

• What database do you use most often? Is it because you want to or some other reason? Is there a particular reason it stands out for you if it's because you want to?
• What database have you had the best/worst experience with? How and why?
• This one's a bit tougher: Where do you draw the line between work the database should do and you should do? i.e. do you use a lot of stored procedures/database code or do you simply extract data and hack at it in perl? Why do you draw the line where you do?

I'll start. I use Oracle almost exclusively because it's what I know best hands down and it's free because my company develops Oracle tools and we probably have more licences through our partner program than employees working here. It's fast, efficient and has many many good interfaces and tools - mostly from us in the tools part =). I also would more than likely be in deep do-do if I didn't use it, but that's not really a problem.

My best experiences have been with Oracle, but, as you can guess from the last answer, the deck is stacked. I have had my share of bad experience with Oracle on Linux actually - installation was a nightmare b/f v816 and the OCI layer on Linux still isn't quite right. My worst experiences were with the antideluvian version of Informix (v6? it's been a while, i'm not sure which it was now). I had to use this at my job at a non-profit as it was all we had. Not fun, unsupported and down most of the time.

I draw the line differently depending on the project. If it can all be done in the DB and I just need perl to get it out to the web or collect the variables, I do it all in the DB. But I also have very little middle ground - which is bad more than likely. I don't try and mix too much. If the job cannot be done mostly in the DB I tend to just hack about in perl and use simple SQL instead of doing procedure calls. Bad habit, but true.

What are your thoughts?

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche
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