What is Free Database Software?

The MySQL

The MySQL database server is the world's most popular open-source database server. Over six million installations use the MySQL database server to power high-volume web sites and other mission critical business systems including industry-leaders like NASA, Yahoo, The Associated Press (AP), Suzuki, and Sabre Holdings.


MySQL is an attractive alternative to high-cost, more complex database technology. Its award-winning reliability, scalability and speed make it the right choice for a wide range of corporate IT departments, web developers and software vendors.

MySQL offers several key advantages:

Reliability and Performance. MySQL AB makes early versions of all its database server software available to the open source community to allow for several months of "battle testing" before it deems them ready for production use.
Ease of Use and Deployment. The MySQL architecture makes it extremely fast and simple to customize. The unique multi-storage engine architecture of MySQL gives corporate customers the flexibility they need with a DBMS unmatched in stability, speed, compactness, and ease of deployment.
Freedom from Platform Lock-in. By providing ready access to the source code, MySQL AB's approach ensures freedom, thereby preventing lock-in to a single vendor or platform.
Cross-Platform Support. MySQL is available on more than twenty different platforms including all major Linux distributions, Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.
Millions of Trained and Certified Developers. MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. This makes it easy to find knowledgable and experienced DBA's and developers.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an extremely scalable, SQL compliant, open -ource object-relational DBMS. With more than 15 years of development history, PostgreSQL is quickly becoming the de facto database for enterprise level open-source solutions.

PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) based on POSTGRES, Version 4.2, developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department. POSTGRES pioneered many concepts that only became available in commercial database systems much later.

PostgreSQL is an open-source descendant of this original Berkeley code. It supports SQL92 and SQL99 and offers many modern features:

Complex queries
Foreign keys
Triggers
Views
Transactional integrity
Multiversion concurrency control

BerkeleyDB

Berkeley DB is one of the most widely-used developer databases in the world, is open source and runs on all major operating systems, including embedded Linux, Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, VxWorks and QNX.

Berkeley DB provides the core data management functionality, scalability, power and flexibility of enterprise relational databases but without the overhead of a query processing layer. Combined with the stability and lower support cost of open source code, Berkeley DB provides many advantages, including:

Zero administration cost eliminates the need for a DBA
Smaller footprint (less than 500Kb)
Simplicity of integration into an application
More speed and higher performance
Less complexity and more reliability

Firebird

Firebird is a relational database with many ANSI SQL-99 features that runs on Windows, Linux, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird provides excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and database triggers. Firebird has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981.

Firebird is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Borland Software Corp on July25th, 2000 under the InterBase Public License.

Firebird is completely free of any registration, licensing or deployment fees. Firebird may be deployed freely for use with any third-party software, whether commercial or not.