On 15 Mar 2004, at 18:28, Matthew Laird wrote: > If you have money.... sure. But most people tend to use MySQL, and > most > Bioinformatics packages are designed with MySQL in mind. The Sanger Institute uses both MySQL and Oracle. Oracle gets used for heavily transaction-oriented work, such as laboratory entity tracking, and hence also for the sequencing efforts here. Ensembl, which is hosted on our hardware is, as others have pointed out, run off MySQL - mostly because of Ensembl's open source nature, but also because read query performance on MySQL is pretty good, when you don't need transactions, and so can use the MyISAM table format. Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK