Hi,
As for the original question 1; the difference between each of the databases list or any database on the market amount to
Price to acquire a user license
(May include hardware upgrades)
Cost of implementing the solution on desired platform
(your time in classes or pouring through manuals)
Cost of vendor Professional Services to help with installation and implementation.
(if necessary)
Cost of load, unload, and query tools.
( if not provided with the Software license or provided by third party vendor )
Cost of maintaining your database
(query performance tuning, Database physical layout as you grow, hardware support)
Recovery options
( what happens if your database disk crashs )
Methods of Access available
( ODBC, JDBC, perl DBI, Vendor specific API )
Number of concurrent user logged on running queries
(not just today but you should also plan for growth)
Amount of data supported
(not just today but you should also plan for growth)
Query (select) performance
(possibly affected by amount of data )
Update ( Insert/Update/Delete )Performance
(possibly affected by amount of data )
Vendor Support when you encounter problems.
(who are you going to call )
However given the original post Question 2, I think question 1 is irrelevant.
Oracle, Teradata, Sybase, Informix, IBM DB2, cost 10's of Thousands of dollars for a single license to support database sizes between 100 and 300 Gig worth of data. Now some of these costs can be offset by Corporate and Site License.
If you are considering MS-Access I would tend to think these other Database Vendors are out of the question for your application just because they aren't cost effective for the amount of data in question.
I have never used MS Access so I don't what the most data or number of concurrent queries you can support in MS-ACCESS but I can't believe it would support ( effieciently ) more than 10's of GIG of data.
However as you grow you may have to re-implement your database back end. The nice thing is if you limit your Database access to ODBC or JDBC you should be able to easily substitute a new Database backend as you grow without much disturbance to your applications.
In response to the second post.
You may want to learn about Teradata, a Division of NCR.
You should lump Teradata into your description....
…, the rest are Relational Database management Systems (RDBMS) special
designed for big databases, large transactions, lots of users.
Because, that description best describes Teradata.
You can look at Analyst reports at
you can look at customer success and award stories at.
You can download a Free fully functional demo copy of Teradata for Windows at
Teradata controls some of the Largest ( Multiple TeraByte systems ) in the world.
SBC Communications, Inc. (
with a
database size of 10.5 TB, was the largest site
in the program and led all entrants in the category
of Decision Support Systems (DSS), Database Size,
All Platforms.
SBC uses NCR Corporation database management system
( Teradata ) and server products and an LSI Logic
Storage Systems, Inc. storage solution.
There is a NCR:Teradata Forum on Tek-Tips if you have Teradata Specific questions please post them over there.