Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Open Source Databases Save Enterprises Money

An article today, written by VNUnet.com, describes in some broad strokes, that Open Source databases can be up to 60% "cheaper" than commercial alternatives.

The article takes aim at Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2 which can be expensive to maintain, mostly due to their complexities and their licensing costs. Other software, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL (the most "common" Open Source databases) are mentioned, as well as EnterpriseDB, a commercially supported fork of PostgreSQL. Notably absent from the article are a large number of commercial databases (including Cache), and a large number of Open Source databases (including Firebird). However, even with the omissions of some of the players in both fields, the article is correct.

If one of the Open Source databases has the features that you and your business need, your costs will be reduced by using the Open Source. In our experience, Open Source databases need less "tweaking", and tend to be more stable.

An example: One of our clients has an Informix database (a commercial system) which contains almost 1GB of data, and the same client has a PostgreSQL database (an Open Source system) which contains almost 3GB of data. After four years of usage, the Informix database is averaging 2 major problems per year, including, most recently, an index corruption that forced us to drop several tables and reload the information. To date, they have had only one issue with PostgreSQL, in four years, which required an index to be rebuilt.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 6:45 AM