[H-GEN] databases for linux

[Joel Michael]

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Johann Kwiatkowski wrote:

> Hi All,
>             I'm looking at installing a database for my company to help
> us catalogue our  graphical files and products. I figures while I'm at
> it I might as well add in a customer database and  make it part of out
> internal website. We have a mixture of Macs, PC and the odd linux box.

To connect all of the desktop machines to the database server, you're 
going to have to either use some kind of html (php,perl,etc) front-end, 
or get an ODBC driver.  I know that you can get ODBC drivers for the 
win32 platform ('9x, NT), but I'm not so sure about MacOS, as it's been 
quite a long time since I've had one to poke around with.

> I know literally nothing about databases, but I know what I want to do
> with this setup. I've heard of MySQL and others, but I'm not too sure
> if they will fit my needs, now or in the future.

for Right Now, MySQL or PostgreSQL will do quite nicely.  for In The 
Future, when you have a few hundred thousand records in many hundreds of 
tables in a good number of databases, serving many transactions per 
second, and you *notice* that the performance of your database system is 
suffering, you'll want to move on to a commercial solution.  I can 
recommend Informix, as that's what I use here, and I'm quite happy with 
it.  It also runs on Linux, which is a Good Thing, but is only available 
as a .rpm, which I haven't fed to alien yet to produce a .deb (but I 
wouldn't be surprised if alien choked on it), so it's a Bad Thing if you 
don't run RedHat or SuSE, because you likely won't get support for it.

> If someone can give me pointers as to where I could at least start
> reading about databases that would be much appreciated. I'm sure MySQL
> or PostgreSQL would do the job, but I want to get as much info before I
> start. And do make it more fun, I have never done any programing (which
> from my intial readings seems like something I will likely need,
> especially if I attach it to an internal web site). I wanted to try this
> out first as we run linux servers (which I administer) and would
> obviously be a cheaper option.
> 
> thanks in advance
> 
> Johann
> 

well, this really does throw a spanner in the works.  If you know any 
kind of programming at all, even BASIC or Pascal, you should be able to 
pick up the programming side.  For web-driven stuff, PHP and Perl are 
good choices.  PHP is probably quite a bit less complex than Perl, with 
a distantly similar syntax, so that would probably be a good one to 
learn.  If you can find a book about how to start programming in PHP, 
then that would be very helpful.

The next thing you'll need is a database system.  As you've mentioned, 
the choice of PostgreSQL or MySQL is available.  I have used both, and 
personally I feel that PostgreSQL is a bit more polished and complete 
than MySQL.  To use either, you need to know SQL.  There are probably a 
heap of tutorials Out There on SQL, and I know that PostgreSQL includes 
one.  There are also quite a few books on SQL, although I don't know of 
any off-hand.

But, basically, it all comes down to reading the mountain of 
documentation that's available.  The various vendor home pages are 
always worth a shot (http://www.php.net and http://www.postgresql.org, I 
think).

Hope this helps!
-- 
Joel Michael

(these opinions are mine, not my employer's)


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