2014-12-09T11:35:00Z

When evaluating Relational Databases, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?

Let the community know what you think. Share your opinions now!
Ariel Lindenfeld - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Community at PeerSpot
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60
PeerSpot user
60 Answers
it_user182115 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Infrastructure at a tech services company
Consultant
2015-01-16T19:35:01Z
Jan 16, 2015

Backup and replication options.

Search for a product comparison in Relational Databases Tools
MD
Database Administrator at a energy/utilities company
Real User
2019-12-10T06:19:38Z
Dec 10, 2019

At the first based on my experience we need to calculate software or customer requirements and after that choose the best option. Today all databases have the same options with little difference like Data types, HA, Performance, Security, Backup/Recovery, etc.
for example if you want to design a software with just 5 to 20 users, is that reasonable to use Oracle database service ?
however, from a programmer's point of view evaluating Relational Databases are rated by features like Datatypes, Functions, Index types and etc, DBA's (Database Administrators) vision is different. So my list is
- TCO (Total cost of ownership)
- High Availability Solutions.
- Backup / Restore solutions.
- Performance
- Data Capacity and Security.
- Memory Management.
- Caching
- Inmemory Database, Tablespace, Table.
- 3rd Party software

AN
Director Of Services at Dinamika Berkah Abadi
Real User
2019-12-06T01:47:12Z
Dec 6, 2019

My priorities:
1. Backup and recovery
2. Data security
3. Price
4. Performance

Real User
2019-05-21T13:53:58Z
May 21, 2019

An Oracle logo.

reviewer933993 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
User
2018-09-24T08:04:50Z
Sep 24, 2018

Top in my list
- Performance
- Security

OE
Database Team Lead at Fibabanka, Oracle ACE Associate with 1,001-5,000 employees
User
2017-02-14T19:13:48Z
Feb 14, 2017

A single reason is not enough, we can rank the following reasons:

- Operational Performance (OLTP, DWH - ETL)
- Relate to hardware such as disk (storage), memory, cpu and how well they can use them
- Data Capacity
- Data Security
- Application Support
- Vendor Support

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AN
Director Of Services at Dinamika Berkah Abadi
Real User
2019-12-06T01:45:33Z
Dec 6, 2019

The most important is "Solid backup and recovery solution." Imho.

reviewer1205730 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at Genpact - Headstrong
MSP
2019-10-10T20:38:25Z
Oct 10, 2019

- Capability
- HA
- Security
- Performance

it_user786048 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Engineer at Equifax Inc.
Real User
2017-12-08T03:07:11Z
Dec 8, 2017

Performance, Security, Quiet Easy to Implement the database Solution, Excellent database tools for managing the Database Environment for example Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.

it_user759534 - PeerSpot reviewer
EDW Engineer / Business Intelligence Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Consultant
2017-10-21T21:58:41Z
Oct 21, 2017

Performance, Security, Vendor Support and Price

Vendor
2017-09-13T15:14:00Z
Sep 13, 2017

Definitely Performance, Data mining, easy use.

it_user375219 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Saama
Real User
2016-01-24T11:10:06Z
Jan 24, 2016

We should evaluate mainly performance of the database as well as pricing of the database.

- If you want to host application which has small amount of data and does not have secure content in it you can go for open source databases.
- vice versa, if your data has secure or critical contents in it then we should consider security features of database as well.
- one more important feature we need to consider now a days is parallel distribution/parallel computing feature e.g. Postgresql / greenplum has this feature.

it_user348246 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2016-01-11T09:58:37Z
Jan 11, 2016

Modeling features (from physical to business), sql optimization / mdx support, easy of use

BR
Data Engineer at Broadridge Financial Solutions
Real User
2016-01-06T10:43:25Z
Jan 6, 2016

mainly the performance. For RDBMS you would not be having any performance issue. But when it comes for data loading, RDBMS would not be a good take. This of an MPP where the data is spread accross segments

it_user356925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Business Intelligence at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2015-12-15T15:39:54Z
Dec 15, 2015

Scalability and performance, both in relation to volume of data and concurrent queries.

it_user343647 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Analyst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
2015-11-19T18:37:56Z
Nov 19, 2015

scalability and platforms DBMS runs on

it_user335340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-11-18T13:32:51Z
Nov 18, 2015

Uniform Syntex
Ease of use
Examples of complex statements or auto creation of queries

it_user328656 - PeerSpot reviewer
Estagiário at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-10-15T12:08:57Z
Oct 15, 2015

If it covers all of the project needs/specifications.
The price.

it_user324771 - PeerSpot reviewer
COO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
2015-10-08T04:02:32Z
Oct 8, 2015

Vendor support, product track record, scalability, clustering options and security.

it_user323067 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-10-07T20:13:07Z
Oct 7, 2015

First Knowledge of the platform, performance, backup/restore...

it_user321570 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a tech services company
Consultant
2015-10-04T07:18:50Z
Oct 4, 2015

Easy integration, fast ,scalability to needs and support for all developer APIs

it_user6903 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Engineering at CloudBearings
Consultant
2015-09-22T14:13:26Z
Sep 22, 2015

only one reason as of today, that is transactional atmoicity, don't see any other; you open source them with light versions and see the miracles; graph databases are evolving and once there cn be a better fit not just for social as they are today;

it_user314937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager - POS at Int'ltec SkyBand
User
2015-09-18T21:48:25Z
Sep 18, 2015

Performance, ease of use, scalability and support for all developer APIs.

it_user314886 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technical Officer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-09-18T19:25:20Z
Sep 18, 2015

There's no "most important" criteria when choosing a tool, and a RDBMS is just a tool. If you're running Twitter, then the key factor is performance. If you're running a small medical clinic software, then you need data integrity above the others.

MW
VP Marketing and Operations at NuoDB
Vendor
2015-08-30T08:15:16Z
Aug 30, 2015

The most important criteria for our customers at NuoDB is that our distributed SQL database has a flexible deployment model that allows them to run the database on a single server machine, across machines in a data center or public cloud, and even on a global basis (across multiple data centers) without having to architect a new solution for each use case.

it_user290769 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2015-08-12T20:32:33Z
Aug 12, 2015

Scalability, performance and Business Intelligence capability from ETL to warehousing and analytics. Also how well the database solution can be leveraged in an enterprise development organization. There are many more options these days but not from a mature development to deployment and maintenance standpoint.

it_user290661 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Technology with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2015-08-12T18:00:38Z
Aug 12, 2015

Reliability, scalability, security, performance, ease of management.

JN
Principal Database Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2015-08-08T21:01:42Z
Aug 8, 2015

The RDBMS that are known for its Scalability, Availability and its OLTP performance. However am exploring its Analytical functional capabilities. I have been using Sybase IQ EDW. its serves the purpose now. However moving towards building an Enterprise Data Warehouse –Data Lake, researching about MSSQL DW 2014

it_user286500 - PeerSpot reviewer
vCIO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-08-05T20:16:34Z
Aug 5, 2015

Vendor support.

it_user284664 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-08-03T15:40:51Z
Aug 3, 2015

performance, scalability & security

it_user281094 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Architect at a tech vendor
Vendor
2015-07-28T18:45:39Z
Jul 28, 2015

Can't answer this blindly. Depends on why I'm researching a relational db technology and what the requirements are.

it_user278022 - PeerSpot reviewer
Microstrategy Project Manager & Microstrategy Lead Architect at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2015-07-23T09:17:33Z
Jul 23, 2015

Performance &

it_user258441 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Consultant
2015-06-19T13:38:11Z
Jun 19, 2015

Ability to retrieve as and when required in any format to give valuable insights to business.

it_user256869 - PeerSpot reviewer
DB Team leader at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-06-17T21:33:02Z
Jun 17, 2015

Easy for support and use. Set of high availability features.

it_user256890 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Sybase DBA at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
2015-06-17T18:15:48Z
Jun 17, 2015

operational efficiency and simplicity of use and understanding ( set of features ) has a high value in any case.

it_user253110 - PeerSpot reviewer
Academic Coordinator of Digital Graphic Design Engineering program with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
2015-06-11T03:19:22Z
Jun 11, 2015

performance, security, and it allows OO_RDBMS

it_user250908 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2015-06-06T17:49:48Z
Jun 6, 2015

Wide adoption, Performance, Scalability, Replication, Failover.

it_user247503 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Big Data Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
2015-06-01T08:01:31Z
Jun 1, 2015

1. Performance 2. Ease of using analytic functions 3. Industry hold

CF
CTO, CIO at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2015-05-28T16:04:01Z
May 28, 2015

Performance and security

it_user237132 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at Aon Hewitt
Real User
2015-05-11T17:39:07Z
May 11, 2015

Performance.

it_user236646 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Designer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Consultant
2015-05-11T01:04:48Z
May 11, 2015

Existing organisational capabilities. e.g; introducing Oracle to a team already skilled in MSSQL would likely be a mistake. Beyond that, I haven't 'researched' RDBMSs for some time. The choice is usually clear for me. MSSQL, MySQL or Postgres.

it_user231822 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Project Manager at Virtusa
Vendor
2015-04-30T06:26:16Z
Apr 30, 2015

Performance

it_user219723 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Support at Sigma Systems
Vendor
2015-04-07T16:42:56Z
Apr 7, 2015

Scalability and performance.

it_user218301 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer [Temporary] at a library with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
2015-04-03T11:17:44Z
Apr 3, 2015

Do we actually need any of the 'relational' part or can we leverage an object db or something even more lightweight?

it_user211536 - PeerSpot reviewer
Directeur Informatique at a tech vendor
Vendor
2015-03-21T13:36:55Z
Mar 21, 2015

Perfomance

it_user207744 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Warehouse Developer at a tech services company
Consultant
2015-03-13T09:55:24Z
Mar 13, 2015

Organised, Relationship establishment between objects, Atomic, Security.

it_user206118 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager and Owner at a tech services company
Consultant
2015-03-10T15:31:40Z
Mar 10, 2015

Performance, period. Needs to provide a variety of ways to move and process data quickly leveraging disk, processors, RAM, and IO.

it_user201003 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Manager with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
2015-03-01T11:02:15Z
Mar 1, 2015

Meets Availability requirement, performance and recovery time objective.
Ease of use is also important as well as utilities to load and unload data.

it_user201450 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a construction company
Vendor
2015-02-28T17:56:07Z
Feb 28, 2015

Compatibility. If the database engine doesn't work well with the software you want to use it with, the rest of the features just don't matter. After that, performance and scalability.

it_user200817 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. System Engineer at a financial services firm
Vendor
2015-02-27T20:19:57Z
Feb 27, 2015

Ease of use, scalability, and portability.

it_user191919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Supervisor de Plataforma y operaciones at a tech services company
Consultant
2015-02-09T17:05:38Z
Feb 9, 2015

Performance and more performance. Go hand in hand with the best technologies Disk.

it_user187848 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Development at a financial services firm
Vendor
2015-02-08T05:41:01Z
Feb 8, 2015

Performance

it_user186630 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Expert at a consultancy
Consultant
2015-01-28T03:49:48Z
Jan 28, 2015

The data bases footprint in the current market. For example I am reviewing things. MS Access has been a relational database I thought had a footprint and a future. The stuff I read online about the 2013 upgrade and Office 365 have me thinking maybe my ideas need to shift to something else.

it_user186081 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at a transportation company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
2015-01-27T16:50:22Z
Jan 27, 2015

Scalability, reliability, performance, ease of management and adherence to standards.

it_user183348 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at Windward Studios
Real User
2015-01-19T22:19:32Z
Jan 19, 2015

Replication, failover and performance.

it_user182460 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at a computer software company
Vendor
2015-01-16T14:24:38Z
Jan 16, 2015

Reaction to system failure

it_user181965 - PeerSpot reviewer
User at a tech vendor
Vendor
2015-01-15T16:24:15Z
Jan 15, 2015

The most important criterion is whether the DB comes with a mature BI stack.

it_user180621 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
2015-01-12T15:19:35Z
Jan 12, 2015

The metadata and the less "case when" script.

it_user175335 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of IT at a financial services firm
Vendor
2014-12-24T05:08:17Z
Dec 24, 2014

Concurrency control, analytic functions and indexing options

it_user174942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a tech services company
Consultant
2014-12-23T06:17:44Z
Dec 23, 2014

Ease of use as for uniformed command line and syntax, JOIN performance and features to be able to create sub join / sub view. Community support and widespread use. Availability on documents and technical know - how.

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DL
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I work for a healthcare company with less than 1,000 employees. I am new to FileMaker Pro but my company uses FileMaker Pro (FM Pro) as the frontend development tool. More and more applications will be built using FM Pro.   In the long run :  1. Is FM Pro Embedded DB or MS SQL Server a better choice in the long run for the backend database? 2. What are the pros and cons of using these two d...
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MK
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I have no experience with FileMaker, so I can't answer any FileMaker specific questions. But I am into the database business for a long time, so maybe I can help out at this point. If you are asking for long term solutions and looking at the technology side, one of the big vendor databases (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM...) will be way better. This comes from rock-solid backup and recovery strategies, scalability, advanced-cache recovery strategies, and, not at least, widely available knowledge. Knowledge is coming from a huge hit list on the internet and from people like me and my colleagues all over the world. With a small vendor's specific database, this may be harder, if not impossible. A quick read showed me that even FileMaker themselves suggest storing container data outside the embedded system, due to the risk of data loss. For larger environments, with concurrency, Oracle for sure is the best possible solution. But it may be a bit harder to get it to work, but as soon as it works, it's rock solid. MS SQL makes your initial life easier, but in the long term, it allows you to make many mistakes and not recognizing them until it is too late. Going for one of the big vendor databases has a downside: It introduces you to the big and ugly world of licensing. Using world-class features and having to pay for them is ok, but the issue is the terms of licensing. They vary widely, depending on the vendor, product, edition, and, the worst part, your internal infrastructure. Especially CPU based licensing in combination with current virtual environments can be challenging. User-based models, or working with Client Access Licenses (CAL) also has its pitfalls. As I said, it's not nice. But it is important to stay clean at this front. For a tease, as long as you stay small, vendors like Microsoft and Oracle (not sure with IBM) also offer free editions of their products, with limited sizes/resources, but with a large and valuable technology stack. Going for free technology? I'd always recommend PostgreSQL then. PGSQL is not as scalable as Oracle is, but if you don't need much click-and-play stuff, it gives you most of what MS SQL would also bring. But when reading through FileMaker's web page, I can see you need an "Actual Technologies Adapter", no clue if this has any downsides. One thing for sure: A database is no playground if you have important data to store. Make yourself familiar with the technology, or ask for educational support early in the process, to avoid long-term mistakes. People like myself are offering all kinds of help, from a free response in mailing lists up to on-site hands-on training.
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I have used FM Pro for a paperless construction site and it work seamlessly.
AB
Head - Server and Storage at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
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Does running Oracle 11g and 12c databases under OLTP type workload on SPARC architecture really offer performance benefits compared to a similar specification Intel based server (keeping the Core-count same to remove the licensing from the picture)?
2 out of 30 answers
it_user115209 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Senior Manager at a financial services firm
Oct 30, 2017
In my experience SPARC provides far better performance than x86 based server. Databases are more responsive and way quicker to start. Recently, I had the privilege to run 70(Yes, 70) databases on a single E25k SPARC server with around 256GB RAM. No issues whatsoever. Try running half of that on a x86 based server and it would be a disaster. Having said that, I am sure you must have read that Oracle has stopped further development of SPARC which indirectly means that it will stop SPARC sooner rather than later. Would you still want to use/move to SPARC servers?
it_user385263 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Technology at a tech services company
Oct 30, 2017
I will echo Bobin's observations re: Oracle stopping development. I think the key is to look at the price drops in high-end hardware, and scale out on a 1.5x ratio if migrating from SPARC to x86. Also, look at virtualization low-churn loads, and segment your database stores based on usage analytics and HA services.
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