Free database for small datawarehouse

Question

Which free database would you use for a relatively small datawarehouse system?

Are there any 'special' databases e.g. multidimensional databases freely available?

Which of the free relational databases is best suited for the job?

By datawarehouse system I mean a system that will receive some inserts, few updates, next to no deletes and plenty of complex selects. Structured in star schemas (if the database is relational).

By small I mean about 100.000 records in the main fact table, maybe 10 dimensions, the largest containing 5.000 records.

Be free I mean free of charge of internal commercial use.

Edit: Since so far I mostly only got a list of free databases, let me specify some features that would be interesting / needed:

• outer joins (must)
• inlineviews / subselects (almost must)
• materialized views (nice)
• smart query optimizer (the smarter the better)
• support for dimensions, roll up, cube queries (nice)
• analytic functions (that's the name in oracle, don't know how they are named in other databases)(nice)

Answer 1

If the total amount of data < 4 gigabyte you can use Oracle XE.

Edit: Jens Schauder came with new 'demands'. I believe that ProgeSQL, MySQL and SQLite don't support analytics.

Answer 2

• SQLite
• HSQLDB
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Answer 3

We have had very good results with Firebird. It's free, open source, runs on all major platforms and has support for all important database functions. There are excellent tools available to manage the databases, like IB-Expert which has a free (limited, but good enough) version.

Answer 4

What about SQL Server Express?

Answer 5

If the purpose of the data warehouse is not to improve the finances of the company in some way then you should save the effort and forget about wasting your time.

If the data warehouse is actually going to make money for the company in some way then it spending a few bucks on a real system is probably not unreasonable.