Re: PostgreSQL Lite for low-end/embedded systems (16MB of total memory)

On Sun, Jun 30, 2002 at 12:51:40PM +0200, Raphael Bossek wrote:

> do someone address the possibility to get the PostgreSQL
> working on systems or environments where the total memory
> does not exceed 16MB?

You probably could, but it would be overkill for a single user
environment, and painfully small for multiuser.

> We intent to use PostgreSQL for our next product because it
> offer the possibilities we are looking for but we need not
> all of them, e.g. networking, extensibility or stand-alone
> server capabilities are some of the features which are not
> of interest for this project. Instead we have to worry about
> memory consumption.
>
> Are there any further reading about this problem or configuration?
>
> Support PostgreSQL to be embedded within an application to
> limit the inter process comunication "overhead" to achive better
> answer/respond results and limit the memory requirements of the
> environment?

Ugly. You throw away many of the advantages of a separate database
server (multiuser access, primarily) and end up with an embedded
database that was never intended to be an embedded database - and that
after a lot of work and a lot of bugs.

Look at <http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/> if you need SQL or
<http://www.cql.com/>, <http://www.equi4.com/metakit>, or
possibly <http://www.sleepycat.com/>.

Check the licensing terms before investigating too far - while some of
them are freely available, some appear freely available at first glance
but have very high licensing costs for commercial use.

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/305/ discusses a bunch of SQL
databases, including embedded ones. http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/307/
discusses some non-SQL embedded DBs.

Cheers,
Steve