Commercial Database and Open-Source Database Differences and Similarities
In the Database systems usually, users have their own preferences in deciding the usage of commercial database or open-source database. The commercial database is the type of database that available for commercial purposes and it required a certain amount of money to access it also only can be viewed and edited by certain authorized individual. While open-source database is the database that costed free, but all the data is free-to-edit by the community that cares about the database. Each of the database have advantages, disadvantages, and similarities between them. In this article, we’re going to break down it.
First is Similarity. The similarity between commercial database and open-source database are the following:
- Both use SQL to perform queries.
- In the future, it could be optimized depending on the user’s needs.
- Both can be used to support mission-critical services.
Second is the advantage and disadvantage of commercial database. The advantage of commercial database is that the database is handled in a professional manner since the database is bought and brought from professionals and/or companies. Since it was brought from professional or companies, the database have its own personal technical support services provided by those who provide the database. The other advantage is their own build-in security services that comes with it, the purpose of security services is that it will help securing the database from several threat. Usually, commercial database also has a more advanced and complete features compared to open-source database. commercial database also has a seamless integration with others enterprise software. While the disadvantage of commercial database is the high costs because of it was bought from a corporation, it needs a lot of money to buy, maintain, and annual or monthly licensing fee during the usage. The other disadvantage is that the database has a limited customization option compared to their open-source counterparts due to it was pre-determined by the company. It also has high dependency because it designed to make its user comfortable with the database.
Third is the advantage and disadvantage of open-source database. Basically, open-source database has the opposite differences with commercial databases. But it has its own uniqueness to it compared to the other counterparts. The community is the key and the uniqueness of this type of database, it may be the advantage but also the disadvantage for open-source database. Community is filled with people with passion and interest in certain databases making it have a lot of option to customize in, developers also try to make the database is accessible with limitless requirement. also, the community have a huge support in certain types of form (ex: forum, FAQ pages, etc) making it easier to discuss when the users encounter certain types of trouble, bug, or errors. The scalability of the database is huge because a limitless amount of people could contribute to the database. While the disadvantages of open-source database are that limited technical support that they could provide is limited due to their lack of capital resources. Also, community-driven database is usually vulnerable to threat due to lack of investments in their security program. It also has lack of features compared to commercial database.
In conclusion, each database has its own advantage and disadvantage although it has several similarities. Each database has its own characteristics and capacity depending on their purposes. Users could decide which database is going to suit them the best, based on their personal or organizational needs while also looking at their own financial resources.
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