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Relational Database Vendor Comparison

One of the largest players in the commercial relational database management system (RDBMS) arena is Oracle. Founded by Larry Ellison in 1977 while at Software Development Laboratories (SDL), Oracle is a proprietary cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, among others) RDBMS with standard features such as ACID compliance, Referential integrity, Transaction Support and Unicode Character Support. It has an unlimited theoretical max database size, 8KB max row size, up to 1000 columns per row, temporary tables and materialized views, R-tree indexes, clustered tables, it supports Union, Intersect, Except, Inner joins, Outer joins, Inner selects and Merge joins, and has support for Cursors, Triggers, Functions, Procedures and External routines.

Another popular relational database in the commercial RDBMS arena is Microsoft SQL Server. Developed by Microsoft in 1989, SQL Server is a proprietary Windows only RDBMS that supports T-SQL and ANSI SQL query languages. It too has standard features such as ACID compliance, Referential integrity, Transaction Support and Unicode Character Support. SQL Server does not have a theoretically unlimited database size, however, maxing out at 524,258 TB. It features unlimited max row size, up to 30000 columns per row, temporary tables and materialized views, limited indexing support, it supports Union, Intersect, Except, Inner joins, Outer joins, Inner selects and Merge joins, and has support for Cursors, Triggers, Functions, Procedures and External routines.

The most popular open source RDBMS alternative is MySQL. Released in 1995 and named after the original developer Michael Widenius's daughter My, MySQL is a GPL open source cross-platform (supporting nearly every major operating system in use today) RDBMS. It is not ACID compliant with the default MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB is ACID compliant, however), and has only partial Unicode support. It has an unlimited theoretical max database size, 64KB max row size, up to 4096 columns per row, and supports Temporary Tables, but not Materialized Views. It supports R-tree indexes on MyISAM tables, and hash indexes on Memory and InnoDB tables. It does not support Intersect and Except, but does support Union, Inner joins, Outer joins, Inner selects and Merge joins, and it has support for Cursors, Triggers, Functions, Procedures and External routines.

The second most popular open source RDBMS alternative, and our last in this comparison, is PostgreSQL. Initially released in 1989 under the MIT open source license, this multi-platform object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) runs nearly everywhere MySQL does (except Symbian and zOS). It has an unlimited theoretical max database size, 1.6 TB max row size, up to 250-1600 (depending on type) columns per row, and supports Temporary Tables, but not Materialized Views. It has the widest support for all major indexes, including R-Tree, Hash, Expression, Partial, GiST, and Bitmap indexes. It also supports Union, Intersect, Except, Inner joins, Outer joins, Inner selects and Merge joins, and has support for Cursors, Triggers, Functions, Procedures and External routines.

From a purely feature oriented perspective, Oracle may be the leading commercial RDBMS option, and PostgreSQL may be the leading ORDBMS option. However, none of these four are a bad option.

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