Putrycz, Erik wrote: > In my little experience: > - Oracle is a hell of configuration... but you can make it do exactly > what you want... I believe it is the most powerful DB (clustering, SQL > options, etc.) > - DB2 has more self-tuning built-in I believe and could make it easier > to manage. > But each of these DBs is a whole universe. If you are going to support > that system, I would go for the DB I'm the most familiar with. Nothing > is straightforward with a DB when things start to get complex... Setting > up a backup plan, performance tuning, etc... Each of these tasks > requires a good knowledge. > > IBM and Oracle have a strong Linux support, I wouldn't expect many > issues with them, but you may want to go for an official supported Linux > distribution (SLES or RHES). All their testing seems to be done on these > platforms. > I very much appreciate the responses (both on and off-line)! This client is a small private operation with very minimal requirements other than stability and reliability. To be frank, I do not want to have to enter a new dimension/universe, I just want this particular application to run reliably! I do not intend to use the Sage AccPac backend RDB for anything other than this application. Pervasive just got back to me - $845USD for a six user license on Linux for a flat file btrieve database that has an SQL frontend. They will also sell me PostgreSQL support, but they have not made their P-SQL API's work on PostgreSQL, so there is no Sage AccPac option. Any other DB requirements for this client will be handled in either PostgreSQL or MySQL. If I had my druthers, Sage AccPac would support one of the two former databases, as my familiarity lies therein. I wish that vendors like Sage would understand that adding support for open source database products would dramatically increase appeal for their offerings as well as cost less. For the real-world smb operator, a full fledged enterprise class commercial database is pointless overkill. Please ... keep the feedback coming! This is helping a lot. If I decide to proceed with this I'll document the process for posterity and the benefit of others. -- Bill Strosberg