mSQL

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

mSQL or Mini SQL is a lightweight client/server database from Hughes Technologies. Originally developed in 1994, mSQL filled a vacuum that existed between the embedded desktop databases like Microsoft Access and the enterprise-level commercial databases such as Oracle and DB2. Between 1994 and 1997, it grew in popularity and became the primary database of choice for open source developers.

Though it was the database of choice of Open Source, mSQL itself was not an open source technology. By 1996, development on mSQL began to stagnate and MySQL arose to fill that void. By 1999, MySQL had gone well beyond mSQL in popularity and today mSQL has less visibility. Nevertheless, the database is still in active development with version 3.8 released as recently as June 9, 2006.

[edit] Host Languages

The mSQL site says that it supports a handful of languages.

C Included with the software
Perl
Java through mSQL-JDBC (Unsupported / bad link)
Delphi (Bad Link)
Tcl/Tk (Unsupported / bad link)

Although the included C API is fairly straightforward to use it can be unreliable for simple things getting the number of rows in a table. This is true also of the included msqlexport command line utility which often silently truncates output.