EnterpriseDB Corporation White Paper Sample

For years, choosing a relational DBMS boiled down to one question: Does it work? Only in the past ten years have there been multiple market-leading DBMS that could run substantially all OLTP applications on a variety of large multiprocessor systems. Before then, DBMS choices were sharply constrained by such factors as row-level locking, subquery execution, online backup performance, multiprocessor support, or basic functionality in triggers, stored procedures, and declarative referential integrity.

But now the choices are broader. No matter what your OLTP application design or (almost) transaction volume, you can probably get the job done with any of Oracle, DB2, or Informix. Postgres Plus isn't far behind. If you're only using standard alphanumeric datatypes, the list expands further, to include products from Microsoft, Sybase, Progress, and perhaps MySQL as well. And if you want to do analytics, the list of viable data warehouse DBMS is probably even longer.

If many DBMS can do the job for you, which should you choose? How about the least costly one? That's almost always the right answer, provide you account for all the various elements of TCO.