PSIG 40: Thursday December 7th, 2000

Now that we have Unix underneath Mac OS X, we have many more excellent relational database choices. I talked about the different kinds of databases: free form, flat file and relational.

I showed how a flat file database could be viewed as a table, and how a relational database could be viewed as multiple tables with related information. I created a simple name/phone number table to illustrate my examples. What's really sick is that I wrote an AppleScript to generate valid random phone numbers to populate my example.

I then went onto SQL. I ran out of time writing my presentation, so I winged it from there, typing SQL into FrontBase to give an example how to create, update and delete tables and rows. Finally I talked about the ACID test: atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability.

Wrapping up the talk, I gave my impressions of MySQL, PostgreSQL, FrontBase and OpenBase. Bottom line: Use PostgreSQL if you want a free open source database; FrontBase if you want a great commercial database at a low price; OpenBase if you want a great graphical administration and data modeling tool.

Thursday, December 07, 2000
12:00 AM