Database - summary

[Benjamin J. Burger]

If you can not afford Oracle, I have heard
some good things about postGRESql (its free).
You can down load it from http://postgresql.org
It works great on linux which you can also get for free.
http://redhat.com - in fact the latest distribution contains postgresql and
mySQL http://www.mysql.com/
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/

Set it up on any desktop computer, get your apache and ftp servers
running load your images into your www directories and index them with
your database. You can then build your browser interfaces using perl.

-These systems are great if you have a limited number of users writing to
the database.

If your museum has the money for oracle,
I would recommend using Portal, which is a webclient interface programmed in
Oracle's PL/SQL.
PL/SQL is easy to learn, if you know some html and sql and you can easily
take the business
interfaces and turn them into museum interfaces for your database.

We currently use Oracle8i with 20 read/write and 4,000 read users a day,
on a database that contains 300,000 records with 6,000 images/binary data.

On a related note.....

Currently I am trying to find out if there is an interest in the museum
community
for Database Connectively Software; free downloadable software that would
allow
smaller museums to upload collection databases and images into centralized
systems which would
be accessible and operate over the Internet. If your interested in
participating in a pilot
study, send me an e-mail off list.

Sincerely,

Benjamin John Burger
American Museum of Natural History
Division of Paleontology
http://paleo.amnh.org