Migrating from one database technology to another these days is easier than ever, with the cloud providers not only offering many RDBMS products but migration strategies and tools that can do a lot of the hard work. For instance, see the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and the AWS Database Migration Service pages that guide you through the process of converting and migrating your schema and data from the source to the target platform.

What can be more challenging, is bringing your DBAs up to speed with the new database platform where the features all have slightly different names behind them - or more confusingly, similar names for different concepts, for example, a PostgreSQL cluster is a collection of databases with a central data dictionary, whereas an Oracle cluster is a number of servers - and of course, there are database objects (table/index) called clusters just to add to the confusion.

So with that in mind, I thought I’d continue the idea that Mick McGuinness, our Product Manager here at DBmarlin, had started had started, by comparing database terminology across our supported database platforms. We currently support Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, and IBM Db2.

Of course, there are consistent themes running through all the major database vendors’ products, and they share a lot in common. For example, all the databases here are transactionally ACID compliant and therefore operate with logging of some sort to ensure committed transactions are persistent on disk. They are all capable of being backed up online and are widely used as backend data stores for internet-facing systems that operate 24x7. They all have a query optimizer which can be examined to find the best possible query path and they all expose wait states so that we can diagnose issues with a toolset like DBmarlin. There are also some notable differences too, or cases where different vendors have the same features but decide to use different names for them.

To start with, let’s collate all the glossaries. I’m not suggesting you read these, just letting you have an easy access point to dive into vendor documentation. Most vendors have a useable glossary in one place with Microsoft being the exception. It seems they decided to break the glossary down into relevant chunks and push it down into each documentation section, so, to make things consistent, I’ve put a link to the SQL Server 2014 glossary, so the latest version features will have to be searched for.

• https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/21/cncpt/glossary.html (Oracle Database 21c)
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/sql/2014/2014-toc/glossary?view=sql-server-2014 (SQL Server 2014 - last available Glossary)
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/glossary.html (MySQL 8.0)
• https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/glossary.html (PostgreSQL current version)
• https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/architecture/glossary.html (CockroachDB current version)
• https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2/11.5?topic=glossary (IBM DB2 11.5)
• https://mariadb.com/docs/glossary/ (MariaDB current version)

Now we come to the main terminology comparison and again, I’m not expecting this to be read end-to-end but hopefully, it will be a useful lookup tool.

We have included all the most useful information, but if it is missing a feature you’ve had trouble tracking down, let us know and we’ll add it to the list for when we re-publish.

DBmarlin provides a common interface to view performance across multiple database vendors (all those in the table above) which help avoids some of these problems of terminology. This is helpful if you are learning a new database engine having worked with a different one in past or you are part of a team which is responsible for database performance across a mixture of database technologies.

Ready to try DBmarlin?

If you would like to find out more about DBmarlin and why we think it is special, try one of the links below.

• Get hands-on without an installation at play.dbmarlin.com
• Download DBmarlin from www.dbmarlin.com, with one FREE standard edition license, which is free forever for 1 target database.
• Join our new community at https://community.dbmarlin.com/invitation?code=74020A