GnuCash!

Linux SQL Databases and Tools

This page is not a complete listing. Use the following cross-references to form a more complete picture.

• Linux Non-SQL Databases lists OODBMS, xBase, Pick and other database systems.
• Linux SQL Programming Interfaces lists ODBC, JDBC and data dictionary API's for SQL databases.
• Linux Database Management and RAD Tools lists graphical GUI tools for developing database apps and administering databases.
• Web-to-Database Gateways and Scripting Languages
• CBBrowne's Relational Database Management System pages.
• Slashdot's discussion of OODBMS vs. SQL Databases
• Pal's Linux RDBMS Library
• The Free Database List
• Browne's RDBMS List
• SAL's List of Relational DBMS
• SAL's List of Object-Oriented DBMS
• SAL's List of Utilities & Other Databases
• ACM SIGMOD Index of Publicly Available Database Software

Hot! If you like this page, then check out Enterprise Linux (TM)

Open Source Databases

Please Note, in addition to the listings below, many of the commercial database vendors have free "personal edition" or "single user" policies that allow their products to be used free of charge at home or in non-commercial applications. The goal of these policies to allow users to evaluate their software free-of-charge, and to allow developers to port their applications without making a large financial investment.

SQLite Embeddable SQL Database Engine (New Listing!)

SQLite Embeddable SQL Database Engine is a C library that implements an entire SQL server. This allows application programmers to embed an SQL server directly into thier application. Note that this is not a client library, and it cannot be used to contact an SQL server.

• Implements most of the SQL 92 dialect.
• Small footprint; 25K lines of code.
• Sources in the public domain; no license.

McKoi SQL Database

The McKoi SQL Database is written entirely in Java. Supports transactions, referential integrity, triggers, indexes, Java-specific enhancements. Supports multi-threaded, multi-client operation; embedable. Released under the GPL license. This is probably the most advanced open-source pure-Java database out there.

SAP DB

The SAP DB is the liberation, under the GPL/LGPL license, of the SAP AG database. This is a major enterprise-class database.

HypersonicSQL

hsql is a small, (100KB) fast, embeddable relational DB written entirely in Java. Supports only a subset of the SQL standard. A 'stable' version now available. Modified BSD license.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful and complete SQL implementation that rivals commercial databases such as Oracle. This database (along with MySQL) is the leading GPL'ed database system for the GNU/Linux & BSD platforms. Commercial support is available from a company formed by the leading Postgres developers.

• Fully Transactional, with full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) properties. Seven different levels of locking for consistent queries and updates.
• Tremendous performance improvements in Version 7.0
• Support for Triggers
• Support for user defined data types.
• Support for stored procedures. These can be defined in a variety of ways, including an internal language, or very generally as a shared library, written in any language, linked into the Postgres server.
• On-Line Backups
• Multiple index type (b-tree, hash, etc.)
• Commercial ODBC drivers from OpenLink
• Non-commercial ODBC drivers
• The Postgres HOWTO provides an extensive reference for a large number of Postgres facts and tools.

MySQL

MySQL from MySQL AB is, with Postgres, one of the most popular GPL'ed databases for the GNU/Linux and BSD platforms.

• Commercial sales, support and training is available from NuSphere. They also do contract programming and infrastructure enhancements and feature additions for MySQL.
• Commercial support from AbriaSoft.
• Rudimentary support for table locking recently added.
• Complex but powerful user access control mechanism.
• Multi-threaded for parallel queries
• Includes ODBC, Perl, C, Java, Tcl, Python API's

InterBase

The InterBase SQL server from InterBase Corp. is the well-known InterBase database released under an open source (MPL) license. In case you are wondering why you haven't heard of InterBase before, note that they were recently spun off from Inprise, which is, of course, the new name for Borland.

CQL++

Machine Independent Software offers the CQL++ DBMS. Originally developed originally as a full-featured commercial software product, it is currently available under several licenses, including the GNU GPL. (The free version is under GPL, non-free, non-GPL versions are available at reasonable cost.) The feature list mentions the following:

• Transaction support, including commit, rollback, nested transactions, logging, failure recovery.
• ANSI 1989 Level 2 SQL and ODBC Level 1 API support
• ISAM or B-tree access
• Unlimited number of cursors
• BLOB (Binary Large Object) Support
• Optimistic concurrency control with shared read locks.
• Preprocessor for embedding SQL in C++

Gadfly

Gadfly is a small, portable database system written entirely in python and specifically intended for python programmers. Database files are portable from Win95 to Linux. Source code freely available, and is commercially supported by Chordate Systems.

GigaBASE and FastDB

GigaBASE (US Mirror) and FastDB (US Mirror) are memory & file-based databases with an SQL-like query language. Because they compile into an application, they avoid most of the DB management problems of client-server. BSD-like license.

GNU SQL

GNU SQL from Russia ... project development seems to have stalled in 1998.

Commercial SQL Databases

This section (of commercial databases) is no longer actively maintained. After all of the 'big boys' announced availability on Linux in 1998, so did everyone else, and it has become impossible/impractical to attempt to list all of the commercial databases available for Linux.

MimerSQL

Mimer SQL is unique in that it focuses on providing a small-footprint database suitable for embedding into applications. Drivers for ODBC, JDBC, ESQL API's. Runs on most Unix's, as well as Windows and OpenVMS.

Cache

Cache is a "multi-dimensional data engine", based on ANSI MUMPS, and thus popular in the medical world. Includes a SQL interfaces, ODBC drivers and an Apache web module.

DBMaker

DBMaker is a full-fledged commercial database. A sample of the features include:

• Two-phase commit transactions
• Triggers, stored procedures, user defined functions.
• BLOB's, full-text search engine
• Foreign Keys
• online full and incremental backup, journaling.
• privilege management on table columns, stored procedures.
• OLTP

IBM DB2

IBM has announced availability and support for the DB2 for Linux database. The DB2 Universal Database is the flagship database: it boasts a long track record of large installations and rich & powerful features. Interesting twists include:

• Free download of trial beta
• User support via a news forum.
• Includes the Web Control Center, a graphical database administration tool.
• Includes net.data multi-database access and web programming API's.

Ingres

Computer Associates has announced the availability of its Ingres II database on Linux in 4Q98. It is currently available for beta testing.

Oracle

Oracle has announced that it will be making available its Oracle 8 and 8.1 database products on Linux in 1Q99. A trial version is currently available for download.

• The Oracle HOWTO on Sunsite.

Informix

Informix, now a division of IBM, has been offering a variety of its products on the Linux operating system for years. In particular, the SE Standard Engine database, ESQL/C and Connect are available on Linux as supported products. Free evaluation versions are available.

Informix-SE is a high-quality, powerful and feature-rich SQL database aimed at folks looking for a low-maintenance, easy-to-administer database.

• The International Informix User Group Software Repository contains a wide selection of goodies in source form.
• A listing of Informix-on-Linux HOWTO's, including installation, configuration, compiling & more.
• The Informix on Linux page provides general hints and suggestions.
• INXUTIL The International Electronic Magazine for Informix Software Users provides a forum of advocacy for Informix on Linux, including the now obsolete, but priceless Open Letter.
• See also the SQLFlex from InfoFlex listing below. They market an Informix-compatible database.

Sybase

Sybase is now offering Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) in the form of a free, unsupported release for Linux, for both development and deployment. Besides a raft of flagship-product capabilities, Sybase currently holds the world TPM/C speed record on a non-clustered SMP box.

Sybase also offers the OpenClient/C libraries in free, unsupported form. These libraries allow Linux clients to connect to Sybase server products. They are available in

• the old a.out binary format,
• the ELF binary format,
• the ELF dynamically loadable format

There are various Open Source tools for Sybase:

• The Sybperl Sybase OpenClient extensions to Perl.
• The SQSH SQL Shell for Unix provides a powerful interface for Sybase databases.
• Sybase FAQ
• The Web/Genera web-to-Sybase interface.

SOLID

The SOLID SQL Server is available from Solid Information Technology Ltd. These folks are interesting to look at for a number of reasons: they offer a free evaluation copy, they claim support on Linux SMP, and they provide clients for non-Linux systems that can talk to Linux servers.

Taking the enterprise computing viewpoint, Solid is particularly interesting because it provides a number of the features required in an industrial strength database. I've abstracted a sampling of these from their FAQ and server technology overview, but probably don't do it justice:

• Online Backups, allowing a consistent snapshot of the database to be taken without taking the server off-line.
• Recovery to last committed transaction after power failure, using a fast roll-forward from the last checkpoint.
• Role privileges: users can be given password-protected privileges to delete, insert, update and/or select.
• Query Optimization, with ability to audit optimization statistics.
• BLOb support (Binary Large Objects)
• Versioning and pessimistic and optimistic concurrency control, including SHARED, INTENT and EXCLUSIVE locking.

New: The Free Linux SOLID Desktop Campaign is promoting a two-connection version of the server.

• Third Party Tools for SOLID -- Perl, python, ODBC, JDBC, Tcl, and much more.

Empress

Empress provides the EmpSQL database as well as a variety of add-on products, including Motif-based clients. Some EmpSQL features that caught my eye:

• Transaction Check-pointing and Rollback
• Two-Phase Commit
• BLOb support (Binary Large Objects)
• "Host Language" C bindings that sidestep the performance overhead introduced by SQL parsers.
• Foreign Key support for referential integrity

• product overview
• Personal Empress for Linux
• Empress Web HTML Toolkit

Adabas D

Adabas D from Software AG can be obtained from Caldera, S.u.S.E GmbH and S.u.S.E LLC; S.u.S.E. offer support contracts. The feature list rattles off the following:

• Multi-threaded, Multi-server
• Disk mirroring for fault tolerance
• Synchronized Replicas
• Multiple SQL Dialects, incl. ANSI, Oracle, DB2
• BLOBs
• Optimistic Locking

A Menu-driven database administration tool supports:

• Wide variety of performance statistics
• Tracing, Logging Backup

• ADABAS D Personal Edition on Linux - HowTo
• Software AG U.S. Sales Office
• VORTEXJava (tm) from Trifox
• VORTEXjdbc (tm) from Trifox

Velocis Database Server

Raima's Velocis Database Server is a client/server SQL database engine that is built into thousands of commercial applications. It offers multiple API's, including an ANSI SQL C-API, a low-level C-API, C++ class libraries, and a custom API through Server Extensions. Velocis supports the relational database model and the pointer-based network database model, but for flexibility and performance, developers can combine these two database models. The Server Extension feature allows application code to be hosted directly on the database server, reducing network traffic.

mSQL

The MiniSQL database from Hughes Technologies provides a simple, fast database that supports a subset of SQL. This is a popular, solid, widely used database and is superb for basic database applications. It comes with an extensive set of freeware tools, language bindings (e.g. Java, Perl, Tcl/tk), monitors, web interfaces, ODBC, JDBC bindings. It is packaged as shareware, and the current version comes in source code form. Its principal drawback is its lack of support for the industrial strength features such as transaction support and multi-tasking.

Kubl

The Kubl Home Page describes a "High Performance, Compact DBMS Server [and] Replication Server [with] ODBC Client API, SQL [and] Stored Procedures [support]" It runs on NT and most Unix's.

• Replication / Hot Sparing / Online Backups
• Automatic Checkpoints / Recovery to last committed transaction
• Role privileges for different users
• Multi-threaded, makes use of SMP
• SAG/CLI C Language interfaces for Unix
• BLOB support
• non-locking historical read-only
• pessimistic exclusive/non-exclusive concurrency controls
• OO features, such as table inheritance, row id's, variable length vector data in columns, dynamically bound data types, etc.
• "Kubl/PL", an internal programming (stored procedure) language.
• ODBC driver for Windows NT

The Linux pricing for this is *very* *sweet*, just a small fraction of the price for other OS/s.

• News: The NT port of Kubl is as fast as the Unix versions, and it outperforms MS SQL. Does this imply that Linux/Kubl outperforms MS SQL? I dunno ... but the implication is there.

YARD-SQL

YARD Software GmbH offers YARD-SQL. This appears to be a high-end package, with a large variety of features; among them an X11/Motif interface. Some randomly selected features:

• X11/Motif interfaces
• ODBC support
• NLS National Language Support
• Query Optimizer
• Integrity constraints
• Stored procedures, Triggers

• Personal Edition (free for non-commercial use)

JustLogic

The SQL Relational Database System from JustLogic Technologies. Their feature list should be consulted for details; some features that caught my eye are:

• Transaction Support (Two Phase Commit)
• Automatic rollback after hardware/software/power failure.
• Cost-Based Optimizer

FrontBase

Frontbase has many supported features.

DBIX

Halcyon Software is known for its Windows-Unix cross platform tools. It offers the DBIX SQL database. Some salient features:

• Data Recovery
• Transaction Logging
• Full ANSI SQL compliance
• ODBC Interfaces
• Visual Basic (VBIX) interoperability

LNX-DBMS

LNX-DBMS SQL-Datenbank-Server für Linux/Unix Version 4 ist ein relationales Datenbankmanagmentsystem. LNX wurde als Client/Server Datenbank entworfen (ODBC-Interface), um Ihnen einen sehr vielseitigen Zugriff auf Daten, kombiniert mit der bequemen Handhabung von MS-Windows, zu ermöglichen.

SQLFlex

The SQLFlex database from InfoFlex.

• ANSI SQL
• Row level locking
• Informix-ESQL/C and Informix SE API and database compatible
• Unlimited users per runtime
• Runs on Linux, other Unix's, Windows NT
• Source Code avail for approx $15,000

InfoFlex also markets an Informix-look-alike 4GL, a report writer, and a general ledger accounting system.

Texis

The Texis database from Thunderstone Specializes in support for natural language text, images, video and audio.

A very professional web site ... I really enjoyed the demo pages.

Linter

The Linter SQL Server from Relex-US Ltd. Demo versions can be downloaded from the News page. RelexUS provides commercial support in the US for this Russian product.

Documentation, Other Notes

• Some comments about Database Replication.

History