Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. This is what I have so far: I require an open source DBMS because I want to avoid being locked into a particular vendor, especially one that will send me a big bill. That leaves me with MySQL, PostgreSQL (my preference), Firebird, and possibly Berkeley DB (if I'm willing to part with SQL). I posted a message on comp.databases.berkeley looking for real world examples where Berkeley is being used in a heavily accessed CMS, but have gotten no reply. Firebird is looking very attractive too. At the moment, a commercial license for MySQL with all the support bells and whistles is an impossibility since I'm already paying for other requirements. At this time, I can't immediately choose to GPL my app. I learned that even PostgreSQL's UTF-8 comes with caveats. I've also learned that MySQL will choke on heavy concurrent writes. Unlike in my Slashdot.org and catch27.com examples, my site would get as many writes as it does reads - all with heavy concurrency (a lot of inserts, deletes, and updates). There won't be any chat functions, but it's not like I'd store those in an DB anyway; however there will be message posts. If you think of the project as being a hybrid of online magazine and web-based BBS/social networking, then you can imagine the different data types I will be using. There will be some number crunching, but it's mostly UTF-8 encoded English text with scattered non-English words thrown in. There will also be user-submitted pictures (JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs). I'm content to stick with PostgreSQL providing that it can handle heavy concurrent writes. I'll explore Firebird more too. Wayne Conrad's comment about his own use of PostgreSQL has me pretty optimistic, as does the Proximity multimedia archival case study at postgresql.org. That FeedLounge.com blog Chris linked was definitely an eye-opener. Regards, Anthony
