We are looking into consolidating the thirty or so MS Access databases scattered across at least three departments our municipal government (about 33,000 population) and the County goverment. We know we will need to move up to a bigger, enterprise-grade solution before that will happen. We will probably be adding in data from other sources (namely spatial data from the Geographic Information System) as well – which will restrict our list of possible databases.
We’ve got a bad habit of “building instead of buying” so we anticipate doing the work ourselves; we’ve got experience developing MS Access applications, VB and ASP applications and we have support from all levels of management so we don’t expect to be floundering hopelessly.
Now the meat of my question / request is this: What has been your experience with some of the larger, proprietary databases, particularly DB2, Informix, Oracle and SQL Server?
An open-source solution will not be adequate, we need to interact with too many applications with too many specific needs / limitations / requirements, so I would appreciate enterprise-wide opinions of those four databases.
Thank you.