Short version: We need to switch over to a new database to back up our
J2EE web app and we know very little about other databases and need suggestions for a good one for a small company like us.
Long version:
We are a small IT dept with only a couple of programmers, and the company's web app currently handles about 2000 concurrent users at peak time (though that number has doubled in the past year and will continue to do so). It's written in J2EE and all the database access consists solely of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements made over Sun's JDBC-ODBC bridge (because there's no type 4 driver available for this db). We are fed up with a fast enough and otherwise reliable multivalue db my boss has relied on for years because the ODBC driver keeps failing on us and we have to periodically restart
Tomcat DURING PEAK TIME (and sometimes it takes minutes to get the ODBC driver responding correctly again by stopping and starting the service over and over again). The powers that be are breathing down our necks for a fix, and we need to choose a db fast.
My boss is used to that db system, and as for me, I'm no db admin and certainly not well versed in using a variety of databases. We've used a simple 2-table MySQL db for authentication for the site, but we hardly know more about MySQL than setting that up. I'm really not sure what's best for us since PostgreSQL and DB2 and other things like that are out there. It's been a while since I took an upper level db course in college, and I know that even if that were fresh in my mind there would be PLENTY yet to learn to take care of any kind of large database since that was really just a relatively cursory introduction to normal forms and SQL and query optimization, etc.
Someone once suggested that if we wanted to switch over to MySQL that it would probably be able to peer into our table structure and replicate that and just be pretty much ready to use. I'm not sure about that since we might have to work around some of the occasional multi-value fields.
I just saw that Oracle has something geared towards small businesses: Oracle Standard Edition One at $150 per license. I figure with connection pooling we'd need at least about a dozen licenses, and I think the powers that be would definitely be willing to pay at least that much if not double just so that we could have a stable connection to our database! However, if that started getting too expensive too soon because we needed more licenses, then I don't know where to turn to next.
I'm just wondering what would be the easiest to set up and learn to use, especially with an existing J2EE app. We don't use Websphere or Weblogic or anything like that--just Tomcat on a Win2K box. Please toss your recommendations my way!
Thanks so much...
[ July 29, 2006: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]
