Open Source Software

The Battle for Wesnoth is an open source game designed and created by David White. Released in June of 2003, this is actually a turn-based strategy game. The concept behind this addictive open source game is based on Master of Monsters and Warsong, two Sega Genesis games. White's aim behind the creation of The Battle for Wesnoth is to come up with an open source game based on strategy that has easy-to-understand rules but offers an excellent artificial intelligence and exciting and challenging levels.

What The Battle for Wesnoth is all about

Set in a fantasy environment, The Battle for Wesnoth gives the players the task to create armies consisting of elves, humans, trolls, orcs, and other races. In the stable version, the game offers a variety of campaigns with three challenging levels. But since this is an open-source game, campaigns created by the actual users and players are available. Some of the campaigns available are The Eastern Invasion, The Hammer of Thursagan, Heir to the Throne, The South Guard, Liberty, An Orcish Incursion, and Delfador's Memoirs.

What gamers like about The Battle for Wesnoth

The most interesting feature of this game is its open source features that allow practically any user to create his or her own campaign, and even customize races. Another cool feature of The Battle for Wesnoth is its easy-to-use built-in map editor. Creating your own campaign is also easy, since you can just use a text editor when managing the Wesnoth Markup Language or WML.

If you want a fantasy game that offers more control over other characters and campaigns, The Battle for Wesnoth is perfect for you. Aside from honing your tactical skills, this turn-based strategy game can also help you hone your game planning skills as you create a new and exciting campaign.

MySQL is a database software developed by Sun Microsystems. Since its release, it’s become one of the most popular database software in use. This is because of its proven reliability.

Features of MySQL as an open source management database

Many choose MySQL because of its features. This includes flexibility and scalability. You can run the software from practically anything, even deeply embedded programs. You can also easily create humongous databases, without compromising your database software. Likewise, MySQL promises high performance. It is able to load utilities fast, create distinct memory caches, create full-text indexes, and create table and index partitioning. At the same time, MySQL offers robust transactional support. This includes the ACID transaction support, with distributed transaction capability.

Disadvantages of using MySQL as an open source tool

Of course, the software MySQL has its disadvantages. Some say that despite its claim otherwise, it is actually inefficient in supporting very large databases and transactions. Problems have been seen to arise in these cases. At the same time, MySQL has unsupported procedures, such as Stored, Commit and Role in lower versions. Upgrading can compromise amassed data.

In any case, with the advantages and disadvantages, the popularity of MySQL speaks for itself. It is still a reliable database software that you can try out.

If you have been writing programs for some time, you know just how important it is to keep an organized system for recording, storing, and managing all the codes and information. Having to update data, ensure that there are no duplicate records, and retrieve data within a certain criteria is taxing and cumbersome without a good database management system (DBMS). Although there are many mainstream database management systems around, such as Oracle and MS Access, it’s good to know that you can get the same features and performance using an open source database. Here is a brief discussion on its advantages.

Benefits of using an open source database

As with other open-source applications, an open source database costs much less than its copyrighted counterparts. Aside from that, the freedom granted to users and developers to tweak and improve its source code and other components significantly helps an open source DBMS become more reliable and consistent. It provides the same quality of service that its more expensive proprietary equivalents can give.

Well-known brands of open source database

The most popular server database MySQL is an open source DBMS. Apart from MySQL, PostgreSQL, the Java-embeddable Apache Derby, Firebird, GNU SQL Server, SAP MaxDB, ScimoreDB, DXstore database system, HSQLDB, and CloudDB are among the leading brands of open source database management systems today. Drizzle and MariaDB are among the fork versions of MySQL.

Whether it is for personal or commercial use, an open source database can prove to be a reliable database management system. The best thing about using them (instead of proprietary databases) is that they are not as pricey, which is very important when you’re working on business management programs that are supposed to cut costs.