Subject: personal desktop or embedded database engine

Hello,

I am looking for a database engine with the following characteristics:

a) It should handle up to 2GB-4GB of raw data (total database size
storing 4GB of raw data should not exceed dozen or so gigabytes),
allocated into dozen or so tables, and several million rows; many of
rows holding CLOB and BLOB data (most of them will be no longer than
few kilobytes, but no artificial limit of 1MB, for instance, should be
put on LOB size). Disk space consumption should be reasonably
proportional to raw data size stored, for example large rollback or
metadata areas are not welcome. Data structures complexity will be
low. Unicode support is required.

b) It should be installable on Windows and Linux, with MacOS as a
bonus, but MacOS is not a must. Packing into single installer with a
Java application should be easy. The Java application will start and
stop database server, in a totally transparent manner, if database
engine is designed to run in a separate process, or database engine
will share the process with the user Java application. It should be
reasonably SQL-compliant database, with a JDBC driver. Triggers,
stored procedures, complex data types etc. are not necessary.

c) Administration tasks should be reduced to minimum. Database must be
very reliable and must be resistant to the user Java application
crashes, host OS crashes etc. Backup and recovery from backup should
be straightforward off the shelf or it should be easy to provide end
user with such capabilities.

d) Database licence must allow it to be embedded and redistributed
with a
commercial application, i.e. GNU GPL is out of scope. LGPL,
Apache-style, Mozilla, BSD and similar are acceptable. Commercial
licences are acceptable, too, providing the database is not priced per
end user. A good example of a commercial database with acceptable
pricing policy is QED pure Java embeddable database, where single
licence allows a developer to publish unlimited number of a final
application.

So far, I have tried pure Java Hypersonic SQL (HSQL) and Axion
embeddable databases but they are not reliable when dataset grows.
Data volume did not even go close to my requirements. Another pure
Java database, QED, seems to have data volume limitations below my
requirements, too. Technically, MySQL seems to be able to fulfill my
requirements; there is an example of a Java application with MySQL
embedded called JOSE Chess, but MySQL commercial licence would require
me to pay few hundret dollars at least for each end-user licence,
which is simply not feasible for an application priced dozen or so
dollars, that is why I put the condition for the database not to be
priced per end user. PostgreSQL, another popular Open Source database,
is not feasible because it runs poorly on Windows, with Cygwin
libraries only, which are GPL-licenced. As far as I know, Windows is
not supported by Postgres development team.

Looking forward for your help,
Piotr

Piotr Wasik wrote:
Take a look at our Java ORDBMS (see my sig.) It easily fulfills your requirements except
those on end-user licensing. We do charge for end-user licenses but certainly not
hundreds of dollars! Our licenses are reasonable ... and quite negotiable. It is totally
portable.

--
Lee Fesperman, FirstSQL, Inc. (http://www.firstsql.com)
================================================== ============
* The Ultimate DBMS is here!
* FirstSQL/J Object/Relational DBMS (http://www.firstsql.com)

SQL Anywhere Studio.
www.ianywhere.com

--
Paul Horan
Sr. Architect
VCI Springfield, MA
www.vcisolutions.com


"Piotr Wasik" <pwasik (AT) go2 (DOT) pl> wrote