Which free RDBMS is best for small in-house development?
- by Nic Waller
I am the sole sysadmin for a small firm of about 50 people, and I have been asked to develop an in-house application for tracking job completion and providing reports based on that data. I'm planning on building it as a web application. I have roughly equal experience developing for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSSQL. We are primarily a Windows-based shop, but I'm fairly comfortable with both Windows and Linux system administration.
These are my two biggest concerns:
Ease of managability. I don't expect to be maintaining this database forever. For the sake of the person that eventually has to take over for me, which database has the lowest barrier to entry?
Data integrity. This means transaction-safe, robust storage, and easy backup/recovery. Even better if the database can be easily replicated.
There is not a lot of budget for this project, so I am restricted to working with one of the free database systems mentioned above. What would you choose?