Just think of the internet as a network. How much control does EBay, Amazon, Bank of America have over the network? Not very much and yet internet based companies abound. Thousands of internet companies popup regardless of a non-guaranteed network/internet connections. But, how much control over their data, performance and business rules do those companies have? COMPLETE CONTROL. Less can go wrong with a router running 2 levels of the OSI model passing IP addresses along routing tables than a database doing a million different things at the higher OSI levels and including GBytes and Terabyes of stored information (both system and user data); your insurance policy, Walmart's inventory or a single book order.
Deciding on a database operating system, database engine and their design configurations is an exciting part of IT that is directly tied to the business benefit a system provides; no other piece of software contains more about the business than the components and content of a database: schema, stored procedures, history, views, data warehouses, security constraints, reports, the content itself, etc. Moreover, if a database engine is hard to develop in, has poor data loading tools or is proprietary, projects and development could quickly get ugly and very expensive; tools and integration of a database are very important. With the evolution of technology, databases should not be as difficult to work with as they were even eight years ago, but some databases and operating systems are.
There are many things to consider in building your application database: operating systems, hardware, storage, datacenters, availability, business rules, security, performance, cost to manage, license and support, ETL/load/batch functions, ease of integration, reporting, data mining, integration with other components (clients etc.) and one of my favorite topics performance to cost. What runs the business, the business process or the database (who wags who)?
As with any topic, the internet is an endless resource of information on databases and technologies. One of my favorite unbiased database benchmarking sites is
TPC.ORG It can help you get started in figuring out what database and what platform fits in your budget. If money isn’t a concern, tpc.org will show you platforms where cost is no object and can process millions of transactions a second; all with detailed methods and component documentation.
More to come database topics........