A very large list of things, not least of which is the price tag.
karthik
2008-02-20 00:06:58 UTC
ok - so whats the difference between these two and are they really better than Access?
Rather similar, and it depends.
ANSI SQL is kind of the basic language you talk to databses with. You've seen it with "SELECT * FROM
...". Oracle, Microsoft and other database providers have extended the language with their own commands, methods, etc. As long as you have ANSI SQL, you can do all the basic stuff.
MS-SQL is an enterprise level relational database management system offered by Microsoft. It supports ANSI SQL, Microsoft's T-SQL language, as well as VBA and XML extensions. It's expensive. And it likes Windows servers. It can handle a lot of action at one time, larger tables, complicated queries, and is typically fast.
MySQL is also an RDBMS, and supports some form of ANSI SQL. I don't think there is XML capability in there yet. It's free, and you can buy support from the company as well. It will run on LINUX and Windows.
As far as a back-end for an e-commerce platform, MS-SQL and MySQL are six of one, half dozen of the other. Access will run a small website perfectly fine. I've had a profitable site running for several years on Access, it generates 20-50 visitors a day, and averages 2-3 orders a day through the website, plus a couple over the phone. Once you get above a few hundred visitors each day (which is really an average 4 - 6 visitors per hour), you should look into one of the SQL servers. Also, if your traffic is very clustered, like dozens of visits occurring in a small time period, you should also look into an SQL. Access just can't handle the load. One of my other sites was upgraded from Access to SQL because Access kept crashing at peak times. This site now handles several thousand daily visitors without a database problem. After having been through that experience, I can recommend that if you plan on growing, start with one of the SQL servers.
Access is easier to manage--it was built to be that way. It is a complete desktop database system, but uses the Jet SQL language. It only handles simple queries, which leads to some ridiculous queries of queries to achieve desired results sometimes. MS SQL has a great tool called the Enterprise Manager that is a GUI to manage SQL servers, but you need a development lices fro SQL ($50) to get it. There are other third party enterprise managers for MS-SQL, and a free one written in .NET by Microsoft. MySQL has a GUI front end also, but I don't know too much about it.
MSSQL is designed by Microsoft. As such, it has a long list of bugs that will never be corrected (I took 6 years for XP to become stable, and probably 20 to get Vista ok). It is expensive to buy and runs only on Window servers...
MySQL is more powerful than mssql, well integrated with PhP and Perl, easy to use, has very few bugs (usually fixed quickly), runs on any server... and free of charge!
Need to say more?
(as said above about Access: If you start with Access (which is a "smaller" version of mssql), when your tables grow, Access will slow down so much that your only choice is to switch to MSSQL... So, don't bother with Access either!)
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