Good, Free DBMS solution

rexehuk · 14 Apr 2011 at 08:23

I have a customer with little or no money who wants a DBMS developed... I'm thinking of doing it with open source software to keep the costs to a minimum, and to prove something to myself.

The client has no licenses for Microsoft Access as far as I'm aware so I would need a full solution (possibly web based) to update and manage the DB.

So yeah, what DBMS would you guys recommend?

Main uses will be:

Maintaining bookings
Maintaining venues
Keeping track of availability
Queries

Go go team OCUK. This will be my first commercial DB, fun times. Although I have had training in DB development / management etc.

rexehuk · 14 Apr 2011 at 13:27

Cheers for the suggestion guys, will take a look into it. Will it require a dedicated box to be running the oracle server? Or can it be ran from a single clients machine, so self contained database as it were?

You're looking at like maximum of 4 simultaneous clients if it was server based, thats at a push as the team is quite small, it would expand if we made the database into something for the entire department, but that is way past my six month contract here so would get complex.

rexehuk · 14 Apr 2011 at 13:44

Is there no way to plug the APEX system into a longer term database? 4GB will indeed hold a lot of data, but any overheads are bad overheads considering I'm the only expertise in the team to be able to do this, needs to stand on its own, if they use the DB day in / day out and eventually run out of space, they will be stuffed.

rexehuk · 14 Apr 2011 at 14:36

Where does it claim 11GB btw? This is one I read

Oracle Database XE can be installed on any size host machine with any number of CPUs (one database per machine), but XE will store up to 4GB of user data, use up to 1GB of memory, and use one CPU on the host machine.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/express-edition/overview/index.html

rexehuk · 15 Apr 2011 at 08:08

Web hosts are not an issue, this is for a large organisation with a few hundred employees

. I only started a few weeks ago, and learnt they have NO database to store their information and do enquiries, it's all paper / spreadsheets which made me laugh.

I did have a crack at installing oracle XE last night with the APEX ui, needless to say "more reading required", definitely not a plug and play solution! I will have another crack at it later in the week.

rexehuk · 26 Apr 2011 at 09:21

Ideally I would have wanted to just make an access database on the managers box... then code with VBA and make all the queries for her, unfortunately the fools don't seem to have an access license!

Basically it's gone from an easy RAD approach to something much more complex and out of my comfort zone... maybe I can persuade them to stop being cheap and grab a single / 3 user license.

rexehuk · 26 Apr 2011 at 18:15

robotCocks said:
are you stupid or something mate?

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.2.html

i'm using this tool right now at work to administrate one of our product databases

or perhaps I'm just seeing things?

Because the end users are a bunch of ****ing tools who know nothing about computers? Just the other day I had to show a manager of 7 years there how to map a network drive...

Needs to be COMPLETELY transparent, and I don't have a commercial license to produce software for them for a front end to talk with the DB. On top of that the thing is being designed in my OWN time for no extra payment from the firm... so I don't want to sink a few hundred hours into it.

I need to:

Gather requirements
Plan
Design
Test
Implement

and produce all documentation and use cases for the end users to make sure the system doesn't go to **** once I leave. So that's basically writing an entire administration manual as well as a user manual.