All of the three discussed DBMSes are pretty easy to install, set up and program. The client libraries implementing the C API are tiny; compared to, say, state-of-the-art GUI toolkits, their size is negligible, and there are no big differences in binary size or the memory footprints of the clients.

The increased verbosity and longer turn-around times of PostgreSQL's ESQL API are compensated for by less effort spent converting strings to non-string data types and vice versa.

So far, I have said nothing about performance. I'll delve into that in the next part of this series.

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