MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) owned by Oracle. Before Oracle acquired the product, it was completely free for users. After the merge, the solution started offering paid services with more features, alongside a free version. MySQL can easily integrate with a wide variety of programming languages, which makes it one of the most flexible and reliable products among its competitors. This cost-effective solution helps users deliver high-performance and scalable database applications through several products. They include:
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MySQL HeatWave: This is an in-memory query accelerator for MySQL. It is a parallel, columnar, hybrid query-processing engine with algorithms for distributed query processing. This database service is used for transactions, analytics, and machine learning (ML). It offers simplified, secure real-time analytics. It can be deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon AWS, Azure, and users' data centers.
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My SQL Enterprise Edition: This edition of the solution includes the most comprehensive set of advanced features, technical support, and management tools. The combination functions achieves security, scalability, reliability, and uptime, while reducing risk, cost, and complexity, in managing MySQL applications.
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MySQL Standard Edition: This edition utilizes industrial-strength performance and reliability to help users deliver high-performance and scalable Open Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
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MySQL Classic Edition: This is an embedded database for independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and value-added resellers (VARs), that are developing applications using the MyISAM storage engine.
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MySQL Community Edition: This is the free version of the product, which is supported by a large active community of open-source developers.
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MySQL Cluster CGE: This is a distributed database that combines linear scalability and high availability. It offers in-memory real-time access across partitioned and distributed databases.
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MySQL Embedded: This product offers MySQL as an embedded database and is most widely used by ISVs, OEMs, and VARs. It is utilized for making applications, hardware, and appliances more competitive by bringing them to market faster while lowering their cost of goods sold (COGs).
My SQL Features
The characteristics of each MySQL edition differ depending on what it offers and what clients it is catered towards. But the main features of the product include the following:
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Internals and portability: These capabilities allow MySQL to work on multiple platforms and provide transactional and non-transactional storage engines. This set of features is tested with Purify, Vilgrind, and a broad range of different compilers.
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Data types: Due to the flexibility of the data types feature of MySQL, the product is compatible with a very wide variety of data types, including fixed-length and variable-length string types.
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Statements and functions: This feature allows MySQL full operator and function support. It supports a wide variety of functions and allows users to refer to tables from different databases in the same statement.
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Security: The security features of MySQL provide users with a flexible privileged password system that enables host-based verification. The product offers encryption of all password traffic when users connect to a server.
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Scalability and limits: MySQL supports large databases with up to approximately 50 million records and up to 64 indexes per table.
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Connectivity: The connectivity features of the product allow clients to connect to MySQL using several protocols, providing them with freedom of choice in terms of which ones to use.
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Localization: Through this feature, the product offers availability to users in many languages. The server time zone can be changed dynamically and allows clients to specify their own time zone for their convenience.
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Clients and tools: The product includes several client and utility programs among its capabilities.
MySQL Benefits
MySQL brings many benefits to organizations that use it for their data. The most common ones include:
- Due to its initial open-source nature, MySQL is an easy to understand and beginner-friendly product.
- The solution still supports an open-source version as well, which means users can download, use, and modify it based on their requirements.
- MySQL ensures the consistency of data by storing it efficiently and minimizing redundancy.
- This is considered one of the fastest solutions on the market, a fact which is backed by many benchmark tests.
- MySQL is very flexible and supports a large number of embedded applications.
- The solution is compatible with many operating systems.
- This product offers clients the option to roll back transactions, as well as commit, and crash recovery.
Reviews from Real Users
According to a database engineer at a retailer with more than 10,000 employees, MySQL is a great open-source product that offers great scalability and compatibility.
Yong S., a solutions specialist, system integration, appreciates this product because it has different licensing options and is easy to set up.
SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.
The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.
The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:
- SQL Server Developer
- SQL Server Expression
- SQL Server Standard
- SQL Server Enterprise
The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.
The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:
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Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.
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Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.
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Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.
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String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.
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System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.
SQL Server Services
SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:
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Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
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Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.
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Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication.
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Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.
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Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.
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Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.
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Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.
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Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.
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Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.
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Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.
SQL Server Benefits
The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:
- The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.
- Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.
- The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.
- SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
- The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.
- SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.
- The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.
Reviews from Real Users
A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature.
Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.
Teradata is a multi-cloud data platform company that provides data warehouse and relational database tools. The brand has an extensive portfolio of big data analytic solutions, integrated marketing applications, and services. The products that Teradata offers can be categorized in the following ways:
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Software: The products in this category include Teradata Vantage, an advanced SQL engine and Teradata database.
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Cloud: The solutions can work with popular cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and VMware. Teradata Cloud and customer cloud are also included in this product category.
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Ecosystem management: The products in this section include IntelliSphere, business continuity manager, data lab, data mover, data stream, QueryGrid, and viewpoint.
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Hardware: This category includes backup, archive, and restore (BAR) and IntelliFlex.
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Applications: Master data management (MDM) and Teradata analytics for enterprise applications are the two products in this category.
One of the most popular and commonly used products by Teradata is Teradata Vantage. This is a connected multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics. The product unifies data lakes, analytics, and data warehouses, as well as data sources and types. The solution offers its customers scalability, which allows them to scale dimensions to handle massive workloads of data. Teradata Vantage utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power more models and enhance quality.
Through Vantage Console, businesses can benefit from role-based, no-code software to organize and manage their data. The product offers deployment on many popular public clouds, on premises, and on commodity hardware. Teradata Vantage unifies and integrates all data types from sources and provides companies with a single source of information. It achieves this by supporting all common data types and formats. The product also provides organizations with tools for monitoring, analyzing, and connecting data throughout the organizations.
Part of this product is also VantageCloud, which offers a modern cloud-native architecture as well as hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options. This solution offers new ways for clients to deploy their platforms. These include the next-generation, cloud-native architecture of Teradata VantageCloud Lake.
Teradata Features
The different products that Teradata offers have various features which facilitate data management for customers. Some of the key capabilities of the solutions offered by Teradata include:
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Connectivity: Users can benefit from connections to the mainframe or network-attached systems. The product provides its own extension for interaction with data stored in the tables. It also supports SQL.
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Linear scalability: Teradata solutions are highly scalable and linear. The solution can handle large volumes of data effectively while also supporting the ability to scale up to 2048 nodes.
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Load and unload utilities: The product offers features to move data in and out of the product's system effectively.
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Mature optimizer: Part of this feature is Teradata Optimizer, which is an advanced product that can handle up to 64 joins in a single query.
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Robust utilities: The solution includes multiple robust utilities in this category of features that facilitate data handling in and out of the product's systems. The tools include MultiLoad, FastLoad, and FastExport.
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Shared nothing architecture: This set of features, connected to the architecture of Teradata, is known as “shared nothing architecture” because the nodes, processors, and disks all work independently. These capacities ensure better value for a given task.
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Unlimited parallelism: These features divide large volumes of data into smaller processes that are executed in parallel. This contributes to the execution of complex tasks in a timely manner.
Teradata Benefits
Through its multiple solutions, Teradata offers various benefits for its clients. Some of these include:
- The solution facilitates prototype creation and offers faster times for completion.
- Through Teradata, users are able to use faster, simpler, and easier solutions for data-related tasks.
- The product eliminates the need for unnecessary data movement, which contributes to performance improvements.
- Teradata offers developers the ability to decide where in the architecture different parts of an application run.
- Teradata allows database administrators to manage databases from a single point of control.
- The solution provides the option to get the same data on multiple deployment options.
- The product supports Online Analytical Programming (OLAP) functions, which allows it to perform a complex analytical process of data.
- Teradata uses the Service Workstation to provide a single operation view for the multi-node system of the product.
Reviews from Real Users
Martin P., a services manager at Bytes Systems Integration, describes Teradata as a product that is very fast with good database control and excellent support.
Blaine V., principal at Insight Data Consulting, rates Teradata highly because of its excellent native features, highly stable, and impressive automation.
Facebook, Tumblr, Scholastic, MTV Networks, Wikipedia, Verizon Wireless, Sage Group, Glassfish Open Message Queue, and RightNow Technologies.
Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
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