Web Database Technologies

There are several different database technologies used for both web-based programming as well as for offline programming, so let's take a minute to examine a few different types. Most database technologies operate with the SQL Standard, a standardization of the SQL database query language.

Microsoft SQL

Microsoft SQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) created by Microsoft and has been in use since 1989. It is a proprietary system which uses the T-SQL (Transact-SQL) language to manipulate databases. Microsoft SQL is used on Windows-based servers, and it interacts best with programming languages such as .Net, and Microsoft Visual Studio has incorporated native support for SQL statements.

Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access is another RDBMS which uses Microsoft's Jet Database Engine with a GUI overlay. It comes as a part of the MS Office software bundle, and it provides tools for both programmers and regular users to store information in a database and create simple applications to manipulate that data. Database information can be imported from any of Microsoft's databases as well as any ODBC-compliant database.

Oracle

Oracle is a RDBMS created by the Oracle Corporation and originally released in 1979. It has gained in popularity over the years and currently enjoys a healthy market share. The licensing for Oracle is proprietary, and it is predominantly seen on UNIX/Linux platforms for mid-sized databases. It is supported by the Oracle Corporation and provides GUI-driven tools for programmers and non-programmers to make use of it.

MySQL

MySQL is a free, open-source RDBMS which is cross-platform and was originally released in 1995. The source code is released under the GNU license, and there are a variety of third-party tools for working with MySQL, including phpMyAdmin, which is a web-based GUI written in PHP. There are libraries available for all of the major programming languages which allow you to work with MySQL. It has approximately 11 million installations at this time, but it still is not considered a leader among database technologies due to criticism of slow bug fixes and instability.

PostgreSQL

As opposed to the previous technologies, PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) which was released under the BSD License and was created by a community of users. It differs from other database technologies in that it offers better object-oriented language support in its databases as well as an internal programming language called PL/pgSQL. There are several prominent companies which use it in their operation, and it has received several awards from Linux Journal and other publications.