POLL: What DBMS is used primarily in your lab? Mysql, Microsoft, Oracle??

joaquin939 said:

POLL: What DBMS is used primarily in your lab? Mysql, Microsoft, Oracle??

We are using Oracle in our lab and are very happy with it. We had to hire a team to install this DBMs and after it was done we had to get used to it but we are OK with it right now.

We are currently using Overworked&underpayed labmanager 3.0, combined with Grapevine 2.5 and HowthehellshouldIknow 9.1.

Sorry I could not resist.....

Serious answer is that our Department uses Filemaker Pro on the whole but is trying to migrate away....but only trying at the moment...

I'm not familiar with Filemaker Pro

Filemaker Pro runs on the Mac OSX platform as far as I know. We are currently using FmP 7 on OS X.3.9
Frasermoss, what are you guys migrating to?

Dist with FmP is somewhat complicated, so we do fall back to Grapevine 2.5 and HowthehellshouldIknow 9.1 sometimes (esp since Overworked&underpayed labmanager 2.0 has quit on us)!

Ok, we use MySQL, mainly b/c its free. It provides all the functionality we need, especially now with 5.0.

samm said:

Filemaker Pro runs on the Mac OSX platform as far as I know. We are currently using FmP 7 on OS X.3.9 Frasermoss, what are you guys migrating to? Dist with FmP is somewhat complicated, so we do fall back to Grapevine 2.5 and HowthehellshouldIknow 9.1 sometimes (esp since Overworked&underpayed labmanager 2.0 has quit on us)!

FMPro runs well on both Windows and mac platforms. The data structures and data files are easily moved between OSs. For inexperienced database users FMPro provides good tools for interface development.

FMPros main advantage and disadvantage is it is designed as a one stop solution. It provides a developemnt environment as well as a back end database all in one product. IMHO it makes it great for small to medium size developments and prototyping but less than ideal for really large datasets that need the full power of a relational or oo database.

joaquin939 said:

Ok, we use MySQL, mainly b/c its free. It provides all the functionality we need, especially now with 5.0.

Yeah verily-I would just add that the main reasons are it is free, it scales from small office use to really big(see all genomes at (ENSEMBL) applications, it has all functions of Oracle, and it is available for MAC, PC and linux and has a number of excellent GUIs (some free) and with apache, perl and or php makes for an easy to setup and manage web interface!

joaquin939 said:

POLL: What DBMS is used primarily in your lab? Mysql, Microsoft, Oracle??

MySql, I would just add that the main reasons are it is free, it scales from small office use to really big(see all genomes at (ENSEMBL) applications, it has all functions of Oracle, and it is available for MAC, PC and linux and has a number of excellent GUIs (some free) and with apache, perl and or php makes for an easy to setup and manage web interface!

I'm a big advocate of MySQL as well. Its caused me the least amount of headaches and has the blessing of truly extensive documentation.

But.. I'm pretty sure that it does not actually have ~all of the functionality of full-fledged Oracle. It doesn't implement stored procedures for example.

If you have heaps of money to buy it and pay for a fulltime Oracle certified DBA then I doubt you could really get better performance. This of course does not describe many in the bioinformatics domain, but some may be lurking out there somewhere..

MySQL is OK for light weight database usage, but if you are planning serious database applications you will want either Oracle or MS SQL Server in order to have the tools and optimization capabilites.