What Are The Alternatives To MySQL

[wutske 0]

H2 and HyperSQL are two great alternatives too, tough they are more used by Java developers for doing in-memory database testing (like me ).
They both say they should fare well in production and performance should be good too. If you'll have a high load on your site I'd stay with MySQL.

Another one is Derby, but I'd stay away from that one because it's quite lacking in performance (it's about 4x slower than MySQL).

[manuleka 0]

IIS Sql Server would be a pricer alternative

[FirefoxRocks 0]

By the way, do not forget Oracle as a valuable alternative.It's free for learning purposes, and for business purposes your boss will have to choose between a great professional database and a free one.

This summer I developed a database application for work as a student, I proposed to the IT department of the organization to use MySQL as I had no experience with MS SQL (SQL Server). I think both options are good, not sure about Oracle though. PostgreSQL also seems like a great system but I've never really used it.

Another option for smaller databases would be SQLite as mentioned above somewhere. It's used in many desktop applications like Firefox and Skype.

[manuleka 0]

i have never worked with any other database, just MySql ... sufficient for my use

[wutske 0]

@Cinnamon: I'm quite curious what you mean by "more than MySQL can handle". As far as I know, MySQL is a powerfull database which is used in many production environments with extremely high loads and huge datasets. I'm quite sure that the performance bottleneck will be on the hardware side and not on the software side (except when you fail to define indexes and stuff like that ). I can guarantee that even a simple query takes a few seconds on a production DB2 server if you're searching inside a table with +100.000.000 entries ;)If you have non-relational data to store you also might look into NoSQL databases like MongoDB.

[yordan 10]

a lot of entries. maybe more than mysql can handle fast enough.it should be more powerful than mysql

If you really have a lot of entries, more than Mysql can manage, then you will need a really huge computer ! The limits of MySql can be reached only on really big computers!