Selecting an RDBMS - A Great Webinar

I just watched a terrific webinar about selecting the right RDBMS for you, and I have to say that it was both excellent and left me wanting more. (Full disclosure: EnterpriseDB was the sponsor of this Ziff-Davis seminar.) The lead speaker in the session was Curt Monash, a long-time database analyst and guru who has a great set of web sites and a reallly deep DBMS-focused RSS feed.

In the webinar, Monash took the audience "beyond the checkbox" to deeply analyze the true meaning "enterprise-class" when it comes to databases. He did an excellent job of articulating how different projects have different needs, and that no one database fits all requirements. He then dug into the details behind these needs, diving deeply into topics such as:

• License and maintenance costs
• Performance and scalability
• Ease of administration
• Ease of programming
• Reliability and Uptime
• Security
• Data types
• ...and more
  

To be clear, the webinar is not a veiled pitch for EnterpriseDB (except for the 5-minute product description by Derek Rodner about 40 minutes into the webinar). Rather, it is a fairly deep analysis of the trends, issues, and gotchas in selecting the appropriate database for a project's needs.

I said earlier that the webinar left me wanting... As is typical with high-quality presentations, there just wasn't time to explore the issues in enough detail. To that end, I have asked EnterpriseDB's marketing group to sponsor a series of deeper dives on some of these topics over the next few months. If anyone has suggestions about those topics, now would be a great time to give them to me, and I'll pass them along.