The DBI API provides facilities working with a RDBMS system in standard ways. Placeholders, cached SQL parsing and other things sweeten the deal further to provide robust performance and rapid development.

We're using Oracle 8.1.5 on Solaris which performs very reliably. DBD::Oracle, the driver that DBI uses to access the Oracle engine, is very fast and handles CLOB and other Oracle data types just fine. While we'd like a lighter budget for our RDBMS, we require integrity constraints and robustness that mandates a commercial database.
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