Hi,

Does anybody know how the pricing for MySQL & PHP works? Say if a company wants to use MySQL & PHP for their internal website development, do they have to pay for that? If yes, how is the pricing policy?

Thanks!

dbmadcap,

last time I hear both were free to use and implement on any site.

open source my friend

marcos oliva

I'm afraid, that is not 100% true ...

See the licensing policy of MySql and check if you fall under any special category ....

http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing.html

Even if you need to, it's peanuts when you compare the commercial databases ...

Sathyaram

Sathyaram,

I checked that url earlier. But the 2nd licensing point confused me hence wanted to know if somebody could help.

It says "Free use for those who never copy, modify or distribute". Now while working at a client site, if the client downloads PHP & MySQL for his own website development (which may or may not be a commercial site), does he have to pay?

Basically what the license says is that if your company produces a specific proprietary web application, let's say a PHP/MySQL shopping cart system. You intend on selling that to a consumer -AND- not distributing source code with it (eg. GPL), then you need to pay the licensing fees. If you intend on modifying the way MySQL works and then redistributing it as such, you need to pay the licensing fees.

Just for general web developers that have an intranet (or extranet, websites) and use MySQL as a database backend, you don't need to pay for the licensing.

You would do well to read the GPL. =)

I don't intend to start a flame war, but please at least check out postgresql. http://www.postgresql.org

Doesn't have any of the silly licensing (BSD license, which = "Absolutely, never ever have to pay a dime").

Oh yeah, and it's much more SQL standards-compliant (sorry, had to throw that in there)

Yes, postgresql is an excellent alternative to mysql. I've only experimented with it a little, but the syntax is similar enough that it's intuitive to learn.

Do you have any link (other than the product's homepage) where I can start learning postgresql easily ?

Cheers
Sathyaram

I found a link in the PostGreSQL board

http://dbforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=661806

Sathyaram

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/

Specifically, I recommend downloading & reading the PDF versions of:
Tutorial
User Guide
Reference

(in that order.) Everything I've ever needed to know about postgres was in one of those PDFs.

They'll show you how to install postgres and create databases. After that it's all SQL (through the 'psql' utility), so everything you did in mysql should be the same. (CREATE TABLE, SELECT blah FROM blah WHERE blah, etc.)

Just that you'll have lots more SQL available to you (like sub-selects and transactions)

Hope that helps some.

Moku,

Thanks for pointing a new direction. I knew about postgresql but never went into the details about licensing, until you mentioned. Definitely, I will download it and play around with it. May be I never thought of postgresql because everybody talking about PHP refers to MySQL. But I checked and PHP does have lot of APIs for postgresql too.

Thanks again!