I am develooping a system for a small company to be used on LAN, there will be max. 10 users at the same time. The company is a non-profit so they don't want to pay more for database that's why I thought of MS Access but I feel it's not that powerful specially for corporate databases?

which are other free databases you recommend to use which can be used on LAN as well as a stand alone PC?

You need to say a bit more about yu environment and requirements.

How much data will you need to store?

What OS will you be using for the DB Server?

What level of knowledge/expertise is available to develope/support the system?

well, let me explain...

This is a new established company and they don't have any LAN now. I was thinking of Windows 2000 server and clients or Windows 2000 server with XP clients, what do you think?

There are database server now, do I need to have one or it's enough to dump the database files on the LAN server and share it by users?

one important thing I forgot to tel you, the database will store English and Arabic characters and it may images as well.

I have enought knowledge about the requirments so I can start developing the system but just wanted to know which database is better to use?


Best Regards,
Jassim Rahma

I am not sufficantly knowledgeable to comment on you choice of clients.

However, in my experiance, Windows based DB servers tend to need a lot of Hardware to give decent performance, and they have very limited tuning options to get the best out of them. My experiance generally suggests that machines running Unix/Linux as the OS will give you better performance for equal hardware, and have more tuning options so that you may optimize for your particular universe.

If you can go for Linux (open source, no cost) Then I think the DB of choice is probably PostgreSQL. I have limited experinace with it, But it seems to be very robust, and should be able to do the things you want to do. PostgreSQL is also open source, and is free. In this case, you would probably be best to write the client side in Java, using JDBC to connect to the server.

Note also that you could use Linus for your clients. There are several office packages for linux that will provide Office suites (Word processing, Spreadsheet, Presenations) at little or no cost (OpenOffice is the best known). There also packages that will provide a windows Interface on top of Linux and can ri=un many Windows software packages. Look at Wine, free and Lindows very low cost .

i recommend you mysql database server, it runs on many platforms including windows. its FREE and requires less dbms knowledge

I checked mySQL.com and found too many download available with different titles!!!

which one should I download if I want to have Windows 2000 server with Win2000 Pro client?

and I am developing the system using Borland delphi...


Many Thanks,
Jassim Rahma

please download the file named mysql-3.23.56-win.zip at: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-3.23.html (approx. 13.4MB)

its for any windows os and the version is stable.

you should also download ODBC driver for a client computer to connect to mysql server at: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc-3.51.html

unfortunately i know nothing about Borland Delphi, so might not be able to help you further.

good luck