Friday, March 4, 2022

The RDBMS Players

RDBMS stands for relational database management system, and means that:

  1. Data is organized into tables, most likely collections of tables
  2. There are very specific rules governing tables, organized into normal forms.
  3. The tables can be connected to each other in parent-child relationships, or simply used for reference

RDBMS are highly organized and take considerable effort and expertise to create and maintain, thus they are expensive.

The big players in the proprietary RDBMS field today are:

  • Oracle, by the Oracle Corporation, currently the market leader
  • DB2, by IBM, similar in structure and use to Oracle
  • SQL Server, by Microsoft, child of Sybase, the up-and-coming database of choice

The big players in the open-source RDBMS field today are:

  • MySQL (owned by Oracle) and MariaDB (open-source fork of MySQL created after the original developers of MySQL sold it to Oracle)
  • PostgreSQL, a serious, up-and-coming challenger to Oracle

All of the above have millions of web pages devoted to them, so no links provided.  Which should you learn?  All of them, starting probably with MS SQL Server.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Enterprise Software, Now

A  previous post   outlined a fictional, but highly desirable, scenario where a new executive was able to quickly orient herself* to her ver...