Recommended Books:

Below you'll find a wide variety of links to various sites across the Internet. Our goal is to make this page helpful in both your technical needs and your buying decisions.

General Database Links

This is a list of links to various databases and supporting software. If you can't find what you need in order to get your programs up and running, you might check here.

Competing Database GUIs

We wouldn't be very helpful if we didn't list our competitors. That is how confident we are in our product. We believe it to be the best of its kind and we want you to agree. So take a look, we guarantee you'll be back!

Other Links

These are links to various other sites that we are affliated with.

General Database Links

jTDS SQL Server Driver

SQL Server support can be easily added to any Java application thanks to the jTDS driver. Unlike Microsoft's JDBC driver, jTDS is open source and free to distribute. The staff here at DataDino take an active role in the development of jTDS and use it to provide support for SQL Server in our product. For more information, visit the jTDS homepage by clicking on the link above.

PostGreSQL

The home page for PostGreSQL, one of the best free databases out there. It isn't quite as fast as say, MySQL, but what it lacks in speed, it makes up for in features and transactional safety. I've used a lot of databases and I must say that for private to corporate size databases, PostGre is my favorite. JDBC drivers can be found at http://jdbc.postgresql.org.

MySQL

MySQL is an excellent database that is free for most uses (Beware: check their licensing terms before you use it! Commercial products may not be safe!). MySQL lacks a great deal of standard database features, has a SQL syntax that is divergent from most databases, and has only unofficial JDBC drivers. However, it does have the advantage of being extermely fast and well supported, and there are a couple different options to add transactional safety to your installation.

Oracle

What can I say? Probably the most popular Enterprise Database Engine in existance. Oracle is fast, it's scalable, competitively priced, and powerful. It has a few quirks here and there and does require at least one dedicated DBA, but when you need a database that can handle 500 gigs of data, spread across three Sun E10000 UltraSparc machines and a sub-second query time on millions of queries a second, it really is a pretty good choice. The only real problem I see is that their Type IV JDBC drivers can be a bit flakey. In the future I hope to see Oracle bring this in line with the quality of their other products.

IBM DB2

This is an extremely popular database, even today, due to the fact that it is the default on IBM's OS/390 mainframes. Versions also exist for Windows and Unix machines. It has decent performance, and supports most of the SQL spec. However, due to the nature of being a mainframe database, it can be quirky at times if the database settings and usage are not kept in exact balance. Additionally, no Type IV JDBC drivers currently exist for DB2 outside of the mainframe version.

Competing Database GUIs

MySQL Graphical Front Ends

There are two different GUIs that are sanctioned by the MySQL web site. The first is MySQLGUI and the second is MyCC. Both of these clients do a reasonable job at helping initial setup and user management. However, neither of them appears to be very good at general data management. For that, the GUI leaves you back at using SQL directly to manage your database. Also, while these clients are cross-platform, they are not able to support as many platforms as Java clients are capable of, and they only support MySQL databases.

DbVisualizer

When we first announced the DataDino product, many people pointed us to DbVisualizer as an existing alternative. At the same time, we could never find anyone who actually uses it. DbVisualizer allows you to use any JDBC driver, it allows you to view nearly all information returned by the database, and it even has a fancy graphical view for foriegn keys. So why isn't it more popular? The answer is simple. Like many other products, it doesn't allow you to easily manage the data in the database. You can see nearly all the meta information about the database, but in order to create tables or filter data, you still need to do it all through manual SQL.

Toad

Toad is by far one of the best database management tools in existance today. It is extremely popular and is used by a wide audience. DataDino was originally even based on Toad's design. So why shouldn't you buy it? I can't think of any good reasons not to. It is an excellent product. However, it does only support Oracle, can be difficult to set up, and costs a great deal more than DataDino. None the less, if you use Oracle in your company, I encourage you to evaluate Toad. If it doesn't suit you, then come back here and see if our product doesn't meet your needs.