There were new metrics out this week for both EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL-centric database business, and Sun Microsystems' MySQL business. These players are at the forefront of challenging pricing for databases and surrounding services from competitors such as Oracle, and both are having strong success with strategies focused on open source databases.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness.

Backing up files and directories is relatively easy; databases, however, have some special quirks that you need to address. Our examples use MySQL, but the same principles apply to PostgreSQL and other relational databases.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the world's leading open source relational database system. This release expands PostgreSQL's reliability, availability, and ability to integrate with other databases. Users are already finding that they can build applications using version 9.3 which would not have been possible before.

But there are better tools for managing your MySQL databases. One of those tools, MySQL Administrator, is actually released by the MySQL developers. This tool will work with any MySQL installation >= 4.0 and makes the daunting task of administrating MySQL databases far easier than any other desktop GUI tool.

Times of change are upon the database market. The major established database companies are being challenged by open source upstarts like MySQL and PostgreSQL. For years, Open Source Databases (OSDBs) have been quietly increasing their penetration, but until recently they have lacked the capabilities to seriously threaten proprietary databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

If you follow open source news at all, it's been pretty hard to ignore MySQL the last few months. With a desperate campaign to stop Oracle gobbling up MySQL, the FLOSS poster database has been front and center.

According to a post on the MySQL blog site last night, by MySQL's Vice President for Community Kaj Arno, Sun Microsystems plans to purchase MySQL AB, the commercial firm selling enterprise database products built atop the ubiquitous open source database which represents the M in the LAMP open source software stack.

As a MySQL administrator, you’ll probably end up doing some preventive and corrective database maintenance. You can use mysqlcheck for both. The mysqlcheck command will allow you to verify your database to insure the integrity of the MySQL database.