Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. Free Databases

Although there are some great binary distributions for open source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL , both build out of the box on Mac OS X. This chapter describes how to install them from source and get them set up so you can start playing with them. Fink is a good first stop for MySQL or PostgreSQL, since you can use it to install a binary build or compile from source.

You can also get MySQL as a binary package from MySQL AB (http://www.mysql.com), as well as Server Logistics (http://www.serverlogistics.com/). Server Logistics offers a selection of open source packages, one of which is Complete MySQL (http://www.serverlogistics.com/mysql.php), which includes the MySQL server, a System Preferences pane for MySQL, ODBC/JDBC drivers, and documentation.

Another database worth considering is already installed on Mac OS X Tiger systems. SQLite , which is one of the key components of Tiger’s Core Data Framework, is a self-contained embeddable SQL engine that’s in the public domain. Since it’s already there, and it’s the simplest of the three, we’ll look at SQLite first.

SQLite

SQLite is a public domain embeddable database that’s implemented as a C library. In Mac OS X, it’s also one of several backends used by the Core Data framework, which also uses XML and binary formats for storing persistent data.

Where to Find SQLite

You can find documentation, source code, and other SQLite resources at http://www.sqlite.org. However, Mac OS X Tiger includes SQLite 3 ...