Databases Archive

PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Officially Goes Beta

With the Beta release of version 8, PostgreSQL has just taken three giant steps into Enterprise DBMS territory, with the addition of point-in-time recovery (PITR), transaction savepoints (the equivalent of nested transactions), and tablespaces, as well as various other improvements. Also, PostgreSQL will now run as a native Windows application, which should make it a more attractive choice for many medium and small businesses. LWN has more.

Database encryption

This paper by Ulf T. Mattsson, Chief Technology Officer, Protegrity Corporation, presents a practical implementation of field level encryption in enterprise database systems, based on research & practical experience from years of commercial use of cryptography in db security.

Latest MySQL Fails to Quiet Licensing Critics

Open Source database vendor MySQL AB released its latest incremental release last week (version 4.0.20), but according to some in the community, it still doesn't address what some say serious licensing concerns. Its license changed from LGPL to GPL (in order to not allow commercial/closed applications to link with its free version, but to instead push to them buy a license). Unfortunately, this license change comes to conflict with other OSS licenses, like PHP's (and maybe Perl's too).

Development: Visual Dataflex the way to go?

Visual Dataflex is a programming language of sorts which may be best described as belonging in the category of Visual Basic for Applications, the older style of Visual Basic and maybe even a very little bit of .Net. It's simple and good in what it does. Simple? Why! I hear you cry. Fear not, I will explain why I think this. First though, I'd like to touch on what it can do for you?