Which free database would you use for a relatively small datawarehouse system?
Are there any ‘special’ databases e.g. multidimensional databases freely available?
Which of the free relational databases is best suited for the job?
By datawarehouse system I mean a system that will receive some inserts, few updates, next to no deletes and plenty of complex selects. Structured in star schemas (if the database is relational).
By small I mean about 100.000 records in the main fact table, maybe 10 dimensions, the largest containing 5.000 records.
Be free I mean free of charge of internal commercial use.
Edit: Since so far I mostly only got a list of free databases, let me specify some features that would be interesting / needed:
- outer joins (must)
- inlineviews / subselects (almost must)
- materialized views (nice)
- smart query optimizer (the smarter the better)
- support for dimensions, roll up, cube queries (nice)
- analytic functions (that’s the name in oracle, don’t know how they are named in other databases)(nice)
We have had very good results with Firebird. It’s free, open source, runs on all major platforms and has support for all important database functions. There are excellent tools available to manage the databases, like IB-Expert which has a free (limited, but good enough) version.