in reply to What databases are monks using?

Heh, here's a smattering of some DBases no one's mentioned:

Conetic cBooks
This is a database specifically designed for billing purposes. It's not relational. It's not SQL. It doesn't have anything written for DBI. You access contents of its tables using either some closed-source command-line programs they give you or through a grace language that is a bastard hybrid of Pascal and C. In short, it's not pretty. Our company has a module that we use that works as well as one could hope, but this database is my biggest reason for wanting to learn XS.

DB2
IBM's relational database is supposed to be as good as Oracle's server while being a lot cheaper. I actually don't have any experience with it, since we're currently deciding whether to go with it or Oracle. I'm personally leaning towards DB2 cause I'm fairly DB agnostic. I've been doing things with mySQL for years now that we really shouldn't be doing.

FileMaker Pro
May this never happen to me again.

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Re: Re: What databases are monks using?
by jptxs (Curate) on Dec 18, 2000 at 04:50 UTC

    I've had a little DB2 experience and it's a solid DB. It has all the features you could ever want and *awesome* support. I've never used it with Perl, though so I'd be interested to know how well the DBI covers it. Of course, it goes without saying that I'm talking about DB2/UDB - which is the open system version. DB2 for OS/390 is by far the gold standard. Not even one open systems DB can touch its solid performance and reliability standards. But it's like Ferris says, "If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." 

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

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      I think DB2 was the first DB I used with perl. DBI, perl and DB2 so far has been my favorite. I have found that DB2 was much more "forgiving" in terms of dealing with a slow programmer then anything else I have encountered since then.
      I used it on a OS/400 system. The queries I was doing were intense. The data was spread between 2 tables and millions (literally) of records. I used quite a few multi tier queries (a query which subqueries, which subqueries, etc.) and it handled it like a champ. My only problem being determining the difference between DB performance and what was just raw hardware horsepower from the AS/400 I was using.
      either way...perl, DBI, and DB2 was a pleasure to work with.
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Re: Re: What databases are monks using?
by cat2014 (Monk) on Dec 23, 2000 at 19:44 UTC
    FileMaker Pro
    May this never happen to me again.

    I'll echo that one. My very first database experience was adapting an old FileMaker Pro database that one group at my college was using- that was one of the most frustrating jobs I've had. yuck.

    Thankfully, now I just use oracle at work. We have a lot of perl modules already written that are specific to what I work on, so it's super easy to use- I just need to call the right functions.

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