Best and Easy Database Application Language

[chankya]

Dear All Experts

I like to know which is the best and easy programming language/database to learn which is free and can open source so can free to distribute after making it.

i like to develope for big departmental store.

thank you 4 your kind reply.

PHP,PERL,JAVA,TCL===MYSQL,PORTGSQL ETC.

[CoffeeFiend]

Well, I hadn't been posting in this section for a while, but due to a recent change I might try this again...

Anyways. My answer? Short version: DON'T!

Long answer: I think you have no idea what you're trying to get into - at all. Do you even know what they really need, how they function and all? I'm guessing the answer is a clear NO. Large department stores typically need stuff you're NOT going to be able to deliver:

-extremely complex supply chain management stuff - we're talking about things like automatically re-ordering stuff when it hits a certain level (not just ordering, but payment processing and all), handle the demand of seasonal stuff, special orders, B2B integration (with big SOA systems and all kinds of stuff - must be very versatile)

-it needs to integrate with their existing (various) point of sale systems

-they will need stuff like wireless barcode scanners, price checks, printers, etc (lots of different hardware)

-it'll have to handle complex taxation systems that vary across various states/provinces/countries/whatever and the like (complex financial stuff)

-it will have to handle rebates, specials, gift cards, frequent buyer cards, and all kinds of things like that

-it'll need lots of specialized apps, like for different types of analysts, tons of different reports, and stuff like that

-it will have to handle various departments (at every store), cataloging merchandise under various categories and things like that (by item color and what not)

-reporting - LOTS of it required

-this thing will typically run on a large (and complex) network across various sites spread over the country, with many servers and often some server clusters (some in datacenters), lots of extremely complex data warehousing stuff to do (you know OLAP and all, right?), etc.

-it would have hundreds of users, and it would need to be very secure

-you will need to handle HUGE amounts of data over a long time (also for purposes like exchanges/returns)

-it needs ABSOLUTE and TOTAL reliability/stability. Must NEVER crash. Downtime means profit losses = very bad. So your product must be totally bullet-proof. No one's going to take risks there.

-commercial support available (from a large and well known company) - the old "someone to blame" when something breaks (won't lose your job over it) and also to resolve the problems. This is absolutely ESSENTIAL and CRUCIAL for any enterprise software. Doesn't matter if something is amazingly great, if there's no support, no company's going to use it.

-lots of this software includes a lot of other features like employee management, payroll, e-commerce website integration, and tons more things like this, which they basically expect by now, so you'd have to provide it too

(We're barely getting started here, this list could be like 500 pages or more)

Basically, you're looking at replacing monster application suites from software giants like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM and many, many others that can cost hundreds of thousands of $.

This isn't a one man job. Developing something like this would take very large teams of highly skilled software engineers/architects/programmers/DBAs/network specialists/admins/various experts from many fields (finance, retail/sales, B2B, SOA, you name it) and what not, would take years to create, and require VERY significant investment (millions of $).

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. Bill Gates has the resources to make this happen, but the average guy...

BTW, systems like this could not possibly run on MySQL. It's good for forums, blogs, websites and things like that, but not this type of scenario (many terabytes of data, lots of concurrent users and transactions, etc). PostgreSQL is better, but it's not up to the task either. I can only see 3 possibilities here: Oracle (by far - not that I like Oracle much, but it's suited to this type of job), IBM DB2 (OK), and last MS SQL Server (and even then I'm hesitating a lot here, even though I'm somewhat of a MS SQL fanboy). You would need many databases too, and if you have enough stores/transaction volume and such, you'd need large clusters (well, not just for databases, but app servers too and all). You need something with extreme reliability, data integrity, lots of advanced features, clustering, replication and all.

I suggest you try to tackle a smaller project first, and see how that goes. It would be far easier to create your own (simple) OS from scratch than doing this.

[phkninja]

the quickest and easiest way to develop a database (without having to learn anything too complex) would to be

1) get XAMMP from apache friends

2) Use php and mySQL to develop your databse

3) create php scripts and html pages to modify, update and insert into the database.

Databases can be extremely complex, but there is alot of information on php and mySQL on the web.

I have use the above to create a Health & Safety database for a small company, to keep track of employee information traianikng and accident information

[CoffeeFiend]

the quickest and easiest way to develop a database (without having to learn anything too complex) would to be

1) get XAMMP from apache friends

2) Use php and mySQL to develop your databse

3) create php scripts and html pages to modify, update and insert into the database.

Databases can be extremely complex, but there is alot of information on php and mySQL on the web.

I have use the above to create a Health & Safety database for a small company, to keep track of employee information traianikng and accident information

PHP/MySQL might be easy, but its totally not suited to the task. A system like this is not about being easy to create - there's TONS of really complicated stuff there, how hard the language might be is mostly irrelevant. And PHP is a totally horrid language! Suggesting PHP here is plain bad advice, it's easy, but definitely the wrong tool for the job.

And if you think MySQL can be used for this... Then you're not very knowledgeable about databases either (no offense). MySQL just can't handle anywhere near the amount of data a solution like this would need (in a real world scenario), and even without the amount of data, it would just die a quick death under the usual query complexity, its silent data corruption issues make it unsuited to anything that needs data integrity like this, its clustering options are laughable (it doesn't scale), it has nothing like PL/SQL (rather uses it's own proprietary SQL-like syntax), no query parallelism, no partitioning, primitive memory management/tuning, primitive optimizer, etc. They're barely getting with v5 stuff Oracle had 20 years ago.

MySQL is fine for websites, forums, blogs and the like, but not for such enterprise apps. MySQL would be the ABSOLUTE LAST thing I would pick for this.

The idea of replacing the huge software suites from the software giants with some PHP scripts along with MySQL is just ludricrous. You're better off starting a oversea carrier business with a 14ft row boat.

[chankya]

Dear Crahak

Thank u very much for your kind and long informative article regarding s/w development.

What is the best solutions to develop this such requirement in open source/free available tools what about JAVA WITH Postgressql.

PLEASE GUIDE WITH KIND ATTN.

THANKS AGAIN HAVE A NICE DAY

[CoffeeFiend]

You're welcome.

No objections about Java. It's a good, solid and mature language, with rich frameworks and all.

Database wise, if you're really going to exclude the big 3 (Oracle/DB2/MSSQL), your best bet is definitely PostgreSQL.

[chankya]

Thank You Very Much crahak for your reply

Can you kindly reply what is the best language/database open source for mid size store like wholesales merchants.

please reply which is EASY best language/database open source to develop in who has having 100-200 billing per day and 50-100 items types.

i am asking because i like to be programmer so where to start from which language i can develop fastest application development what about EASIEST LANGUAGE TCL FOR THIS PURPOSE WITH PostgreSql.

thank you.

Edited February 5, 2007 by chankya

[CoffeeFiend]

Best language & DB for wholesale merchants? Again, there's no universal answer. Whatever you know/are comfortable with that is mature and stable enough, has the frameworks/libs/modules/whatever you need and they must be of decent quality, preferably good development tools, has a large enough following (relevant and active newsgroups, community sites, programmers/consultants available, etc), good vendor support, good unicode support (and localization), good documentation, scale well, have some decent and solid app servers for it and all.

You had asked about Java, if that's what you're comfortable with, I see no problems here either. What language is the easiest doesn't matter all that much, as most systems will end up being fairly complex in the end, and a language being "easy" is such a subjective thing (you're after a good quality solid tool to create reliable systems that will handle lots of $, not a n00b tool to create something like yet another useless blog after all). Most are easy enough anyways, the hard part is often learning the libs/frameworks/APIs and such things that one uses with 'em (3rd party ones also). Either ways, if you really want an open source programming language too (any language can be used to create open source apps, but most language/compilers/libs/frameworks and whatever used to do so aren't), you only have so many alternatives. Java was recently open sourced by Sun though (see here).

About the database, I can't think of a single database that would break a sweat with only 100-200 billing per day. That's an extremely light load (200 billings/8h work day is only like a billing/2 minutes or so, all databases can easy handle many/second - just check TPC-C scores, they are often in the millions!) However, you still ABSOLUTELY need a database that is stable, reliable, won't silently corrupt data (i.e. preferably not MySQL), and all the good stuff. The only difference is that it just doesn't really need to be real fast... yet. Wanting only open source products, you're really limiting your choices though. PostgreSQL is still a very good choice (v8.2 is quite nice), but there are a few others (e.g. Firebird).

Edited February 6, 2007 by crahak