As licensing concerns become an increasingly prevalent factor in IT, it's nice to know that there are alternatives out there. One of the alternatives is, of course, migration to Linux and freeware software for Linux. The power and flexibility of Linux and its current software options allows you to accomplish many things, including the creation of an internal database server.

There are a lot of open-source and freeware software of different SQL packages, each of them with its own minuses and pluses. Before you will choose any of them, you need to analyze in detail these pros and cons, and decide which option meets your goals.

For many business database goals, Sybase may hold many of the answers. Sybase is a commercial (but free for Linux) SQL server that is highly reliable, very fast, compatible with MS SQL, and supports different international codepages.

The commerical aspects of Sybase may be more attractive to project managers and supervisors who think poorly of open source as a concept, even if open source purists will not be too excited about this aspect.

There are some quirks to the product. If you are running a shop with Windows clients, there really isn't any free client software for Windows (except OpenClient from Sybase, but it doesn't work with ODBC). For Delphi and C++ Builder there are a lot of free components working through OpenClient. On the Linux side of the realm, however, we can easily find a lot of free software.

If you decide to give Sybase a try for your SQL server needs, let's walk though the installation.

Next: Installing Sybase: A Primer »