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(Continued from page 6) crosoft’s very high-end SQL Server and only
runs on Windows. SQL Server Express is also
A good free alternative to the commercial pro- very high performance and has an excellent
grams is LibreOffice Base. It also has a nice visual front-end for designing and managing
visual frontend. However, the native database databases.
engine in Base is fairly limited, so it’s best to
use Base as a visual front-end to a more so-
phisticated database engine / server, such as PostgreSQL is a free download from
MySQL or PostgreSQL (see below). www.PostgreSQL.org. It runs on Windows,
Linux, MacOS and Unix. It has a very rich
Full-Featured FREE Relational Database browser-based visual front-end, pgAdmin, for
Servers
designing and managing databases.

I’ve been recently looking at a few free full- Summary
featured database server products that run on
Windows. Of these, Microsoft’s SQL Server Depending on your needs and skills, a simple
Express, Oracle’s MySQL and the open MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet
source PostgreSQL all combine high-end serv- may be the perfect solution for managing your
er functionality and performance with the ulti- various data collections. Spreadsheets are al-
mate low price (FREE). You can run these on so easy to back up and to share with others.
the same PC as your end-user applications, or
you can run them on another PC acting as a
network database server. For more sophisticated users, the flat file data-
base tools may be the way to go – especially if
you’re running a small business or supporting

At this point, I’m most familiar with Oracle’s a non-profit or charity.
MySQL, which runs on Windows, Linux and The full-featured database server products
MacOS. I’ve built an experimental version of may be overkill for a home user, but it’s hard
the sign-in system that uses MySQL data- to beat the price. To use them, you will need
bases instead of MS Access databases. As a to spend time on learning their features, in-
true database server engine, its performance cluding getting a working knowledge of the
on a network is much better than that of MS Structured Query Language.
Access. MySQL is often used as the database
engine to support websites. It can scale to re-
trieve thousands of records per second. De-
spite this, MySQL was very quick to download
and install on my Windows desktop at home.
MySQL is accompanied by the MySQL Work-
bench visual front-end, which isn’t quite as
nice as MS Access, but does a decent job.
You can get MySQL at: https://
www.mysql.com

SQL Server Express is a free download from
www.Microsoft.com. It is a “light” version of Mi-

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