From: Lucas Rockwell (lr@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 13:04:38 PST
Hi all,
Since it is MacWorld week and Aron and others have been offering up info
about new or updated products, including databases, I thought I'd
take this opportunity to pitch my favorite database for OS X (or Solaris,
Linux, FreeBSD, Win2K, etc.):
FrontBase
http://www.frontbase.com/
I have been using FrontBase for over 2 years on OS X (I installed it on
OS X Public Beta) and it is an amazing database. Coming from learning
databases with Oracle, I was expecting a lot, but FrontBase have never let
me down. Just some notable features:
"SQL 92
FrontBase is the first industrial strength database server that is fully
compliant with this important international standard. It includes full
integrity constraint checking built into the server.
"Unicode
FrontBase uses Unicode 2.0 exclusively for handling all Character data,
while conserving space by using the UTF-8 standard for representation.
This provides easy support for mixed client environments and their
varying character sets."
Plus drivers for:
WebObjects
PHP3 & 4
Perl DBI
ODBC
JDBC
Omnis Studio
REALBasic
Tcl
EOF (Apple technology)
and a c interface via FBCAccess
It has replication and clustering and hot backups (meaning you can
have 20 people connected to the database and still do a backup -- that's
what transactions are for!). Also, table caching, raw device driver, IP
restrictions and an amazing GUI manager (which is actually just an
interface to their very interactive command line tool).
Oh, price: 1/2 price for educational institutions. I use FrontBase for the
Office Of Technology Licensing website and we paid $500 for a $1000
database. It has worked flawlessly!
I have done some simple tests between Postgres and FrontBase (1,000,000
row table pivot) and FrontBase was about twice as fast -- completing the
task in about 4 minutes.
Also, support is amazing. There is a developer mailing list and the
FrontBase support people actually take turns fielding questions (in fact,
they answer most of them).
Ok, enough out of me. Thanks for listening.
-lucas
p.s. ok, couldn't resist listing the feature set:
Tera-byte size databases
Giga-byte size CHARACTER column values (UTF8 encoded)
Giga-byte size BLOBs and CLOBs
Datastore encryption (block mode, on the fly)
Client/server communication encryption (streaming, on the fly)
In-memory caching of tables
Row-level privileges
Sophisticated locking model
Backup of live databases
Multi-column optimized B-tree indexing with very low overhead
Replication/mirroring
Super-fast start-up times
Stored procedures and functions
Server side cursors
Query plan information
Multiple non-rectangular result sets
Clusters
Streaming QuickTime content
MySQL migration tool
FileMaker migration tool
On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Aron Roberts wrote:
> Two more announcements today of potential interest to Mac OS X users:
>
> - X11 for Mac OS X
>
> Apple has released a beta of this product, which
> "offers a complete X Window System implementation for
> running X11-based applications." X 11 for Mac OS X is
> based on the work of the open source XFree86 project.
>
> http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/
>
> [Just saw Greg Merritt's announcement while I was typing this! :-)
> Thanks, Greg!]
>
> - MySQL package for Mac OS X
>
> MySQL AB will 'officially' be distributing their popular, open
> source relational database in the form of a Mac OS X ".pkg" file
> from their Web site beginning in February. This is based
> on scripts and tools by developer Marc Liyanage, who
> currently offers this MySQL 3.23.x package from his own site.
>
> Links to announcement, current download site:
> http://macnn.com/news.php?id=17948
>
> On the latter topic, other notable relational database server
> products available for Mac OS X include:
>
> - PostgreSQL
> http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/postgresql/
> [Marc Liyanage's package]
>
> http://developer.apple.com/internet/macosx/postgres.html/
> http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/06/07/postgresql.html
> [Articles on installation]
>
> - Oracle 9i ("Database Developer's Release")
> http://www.oracle.com/start/apple/intro.html?src=1439096&Act=4
> [Entry page]
>
> http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/11/12/oracle_part1.html
> [An article about installing a slightly earlier version]
>
> - Sybase Adaptive ServerŪ Enterprise (ASE) 12.5
> ("Early Adopter Program for Mac OS X")
> http://www.sybase.com/detail/1,6904,1020255,00.html
> [Entry page]
>
> Aron Roberts
> Workstation Software Support Group
>
>
>
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