I’ve decided to start an interesting project. I have no idea how long it will be or how many topics I’ll decide to research, but I have at least a few in mind. And this project is: DB Comparison. Now, I’m not talking about performance or deep dive into the internals, but normal use cases that developers will run into in their daily lives when working with different databases.
Since I’m an Oracle person mainly, obviously Oracle will be one of the databases I’m going to have here, but what else? I’ve decided to install three other common and well known databases: MariaDB (which is compatible with MySQL), PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. For full transparency, here are the versions I’m going to use:
- Microsoft SQL Server 2019
- Oracle 19c
- MariaDB 10.6
- PostgreSQL 13
I will try to look into some differences in how they behave and operate, and also might add some usage information and some basic operation stuff (but this is not the main topics I’m going to focus on, at least not at the start). What I am going to focus on are different datatypes and their meaning, using NULLs, indexes, etc.
I can already say is that when setting up a user, I definitely saw a difference between the “community-based” databases and the “commercial” ones. With PostgreSQL and MariaDB, I created a user and could immediate connect, create tables, and work. With SQL Server and Oracle, I had to grant some roles and permissions to allow the user to connect and create objects before I could do this. I’m not saying that PostgreSQL and MariaDB are less secure or can’t have these permissions granularity (I actually don’t know and don’t plan to check at this stage), but that’s something I noticed.
And now to the project, I didn’t expect to find what I did, and it’s quite interesting. I’ll use this post to link to all other posts in the series:
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