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We have the opportunity to expand upon the database options found in SQL Fiddle. Which database (including version) would be the most useful for the community? Some thoughts I've had:

Other's ideas: Teradata (215), GemStone (7), Greenplum (30), Sybase (1062), Sap MaxDB (?).

Numbers next to each option is the number of questions related to each on StackOverflow, as of 9/12/2012

Also, consider older versions of current offerings, such as SQL Server 2005 Express, Oracle 10g XE, MySQL 4, etc...

The constraints on offerings is that there has to be a no-cost edition available for production use. Also, there has to be a JDBC driver. I would guess that most RDBMS that are worth much can create new databases and users with SQL over a JDBC connection, but I may as well mention that I need to be able to do that as well. There must also be reasonably strong permission mechanisms available, so that users can be granted permission to a specific database (without exposing operating system functions as well).

Good transaction support would be ideal, otherwise I might have to resort to limiting the query functionality to SELECT statements (just like MySQL is currently limited). Also, some means of getting the execution plan for each query would be very nice.

I was thinking that, to answer this question, people could throw out the one option they'd most like to see implemented. Then, other people could vote it up if they agree. This would allow me to see the list of databases the community would most like to see, in order of preference. I should mention that I'm probably going to be proceeding with DB/2 regardless of this poll, so probably just take that as a given and consider the others. Thanks!

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    I will add as a comment since I will probably get eaten alive, but MS Access would be helpful, if possible. There are many users that only have access to that system and with the syntax differences, etc it would be nice to have a version on sqlfiddle.
    – Taryn
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 13:55
  • The standout one in terms of stats is Sybase. Teradata will be a niche market item as production deployments tend to start quite big and therfore expensive. Greenplum will suffer a similar problem despite its origina as Postgres.
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:25
  • @bluefeet Ah yes, MS Access. How could I have forgotten? Heh. In this case, it fails my requirements since it can't be accessed purely by
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:53
  • @JakeFeasel totally understand that, but I figured I would suggest it. :)
    – Taryn
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:55
  • @bluefeet ...JDBC (requires ODBC, which isn't easy on Linux) (not sure how my other comment got cut off)
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:59
  • You could host Access on a Windows virtual machine and use some JRMI or other over-the-network calls to access it (pun intentional).
    – Colin 't Hart
    Commented Sep 18, 2012 at 10:00
  • @Colin'tHart Is that means of connecting to Access from Linux+JDBC documented somewhere? I'd be willing to look into it if it were relatively feasible.
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 18, 2012 at 14:07
  • What I meant is use the normal JDBC-ODBC connection method in a Java process running on the Windows machine. Use JRMI or whatever remote procedure call or "web service" protocol you want to call it from your "normal" back end.
    – Colin 't Hart
    Commented Sep 18, 2012 at 20:38
  • @Colin'tHart ugh I'm not willing to invest that much extra effort on behalf of MS Access. Too many other tasks to tackle.
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 18, 2012 at 21:59
  • Jake, is it possible on sqlfiddle or do you know of any other service to connect to the DB and pull out sample data. If I'm just whipping up a quick sample app for an SE answer, I want to create a quick simple DB and connect to it. I'm guessing for security concerns, this is not possible, but just checking anyways.
    – dmikester1
    Commented Nov 28, 2018 at 18:50
  • @dmikester1 I'm not aware of anything like that. Direct connections aren't allowed for security reasons, like you said.
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Nov 29, 2018 at 21:55

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MS Access 2003, 2007, and 2010...Fox Pro

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SQL Server 2005

I know it's a bit outdated, but I work with it a lot and still see lots of questions about it.

Database software is one of those things that a company usually won't invest in keeping up-to-date unless their developers or software vendors tell them they have to have a specific version for their software to work.

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    Plenty of SQL Server 2005 sites still in production
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:23
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    Also SQL Server 2008 (R1)
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:29
  • IMO, the dropdown list should explicitly say R2, regardless of whether other versions are implemented or not.
    – Jon Seigel
    Commented Sep 21, 2012 at 17:17
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Regularly browsing through new and active questions on DBA.SE, I think DB/2 is the only RDBMS which is currently not supported by SQLFiddle which gets regular hits here. And MariaDB, probably.

On the other hand, I can imagine that some of the more popular NoSQL variants might be interesting for many.

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  • I've often thought that taking on NoSQL would be useful. The main problem with that is that each nosql database is quite different from each other, not to mention quite different from the RDBMS's I've been providing. It would be a pretty significant effort to implement each one. Not to say that it wouldn't be worth doing, but I simply don't have the resources to take that on at the moment.
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 10, 2012 at 0:40
  • Oh yes I should mention that DB/2 is at the top of the list, and something I'm actively trying to figure out (the basics, at least). It is probably a given that DB/2 will be included, at this point (unless the results from this question implied that my time would be far more usefully spent elsewhere; I see that's not the case, so there you go).
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 10, 2012 at 0:42
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    @Jake: I would definitely like to see DB2 supported! If you need some help with that, I would be willing (although, I'm more of a developer-type than a DBA-type, so I'm not sure how useful I would actually be :) ). You could ping me at: bryan [at] galador [dot] org.
    – bhamby
    Commented Sep 10, 2012 at 21:10
  • @bhamby - once I get a few spare cycles, I'll definitely be doing that. Thanks!
    – Jake Feasel
    Commented Sep 12, 2012 at 16:40
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    @JakeFeasel - I'd love to see DB2 supported as well. The more resources for us DB2 DBA's the better. Feel free to ping me right now would be caldrich [at] churchmutual [dot] com.
    – Chris Aldrich
    Commented Sep 14, 2012 at 12:59
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Oracle 10g XE would be the most useful to me.

For perspective, there are 77 questions tagged , but 129 tagged . Granted, many Oracle-10g questions could use Oracle-11g without seeing a difference.

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Some possibilities:

  • Teradata express comes in various freebie versions, including some bundled with their own VM.

  • If you want something right off left field, Gemstone/S was one of the original OODBMS products and (I think) is available in a freebie version.

  • Greenplum has a freebie version.

  • Maybe Informix SE. I think the developer edition is free. Also it's dead simple to set up and takes 3/4 of buggerall memory.

  • Sybase Express which is available as a freebie from their web site.

  • SAP MaxDB - originally a code fork of Adabas D. It was released under an open source licence about 10 years ago and at one point MySQL was trying to push it. Used in a minority of SAP R/3 deployments and available as a community edition.

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I'll put in a vote for Sybase as it's pretty widely used and it gets quite a few hits on SO, although I've only ever had a couple of gigs that invole it. We also have one or two sybase wonks on the heap.

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My vote would be for Informix. It's an interesting database that is rather different from the others in many ways, almost but not quite entirely unlike a relational database management system ;-)

I would probably get a lot of use out of it, in terms of contrasting development patterns and requirements.

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I'd be interested in support for EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server, the closed-source fork of PostgreSQL. I'd be astounded if they didn't offer licenses for free, and the PostgreSQL support code should "just work" with it. EnterpriseDB (the company) contributes a lot to Pg, but they keep a few things in Postgres Plus back to support their business, like the Oracle compatibility stuff.

I run into questions about EDB sometimes, and while free trials etc exist it's just a pain. They can usually be answered as if EDB were just Pg, but not always.

Firebird could also be interesting, as it's the OSS DB everyone knows about but nobody uses. (Asbestos underwear: deployed).

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+1 for Firebird

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I think Db2 Developer C would be nice. It contains all blows and whistles from Db2, but is limited to 100Gb of data (which should be more than sufficient). It is free to use, have support for JDBC, python, etc.

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Enable Oracle Spatial in Oracle databases, since Oracle Spatial is now free.

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  • You may be interested to know 21c is available on db<>fiddle: dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=oracle_21
    – Paul White Mod
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 10:45
  • @PaulWhite Thanks. Do you know if Oracle Spatial is enabled?
    – User1974
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 10:47
  • I do not (I can barely spell Oracle). I know it has been requested. Try it and see?
    – Paul White Mod
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 10:48
  • @PaulWhite I tested using this example: gis.stackexchange.com/a/352809/135445 and it looks like it works! Great! Db<>fiddle was able to use the Linear Referencing package, which I believe is only available in Oracle Spatial.
    – User1974
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 11:19
  • @PaulWhite The only trouble I had was that db<>fiddle didn’t know how to select rows where there was a column with the SDO_GEOMETRY datatype. Often SQL clients are able to select some basic text from that datatype. But db<>fiddle seemed to just not select any rows at all, which was confusing. I had to explicitly convert the column to text in order to select rows. But once I did that, it worked ok. dbfiddle.uk/…
    – User1974
    Commented Jan 3, 2022 at 11:19

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