Licensing Support

The objective of this assignment is to allow students to become familiar with leading DBMS products available from a number of vendors.In this assignment, students will be required to compare and contrast 4 DBMS products.

Example DBMS products include, MS SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL. If you would like, you could also analyze NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Hadoop, CouchDB, Cassandra, and Neo4j.After you choose 4 database products, you are to analyze the features of each with respect to the following criteria:

• Operating System Support – What operating systems does the DBMS support?
• Features – Develop a summary of the features of the database and compare them.Specific database features will be available on the company website for the specific DBMS.
• Benchmarks – Try to find some performance benchmarks for the 4 DBMS products that you are reviewing.The Transaction Performance Council is a good place to start but feel free to do some research to find other benchmarks.
• Scalability – How does the database scale in terms of users and data size?Does the database support a distributed configuration?
• Availability of Supporting Software Tools – Do an inventory of support tools available for the database including query and analysis tools, data warehousing support tools, database administration tools, backup and recovery tools, performance monitoring tools, capacity planning tools, database utilities, and support for various programming languages.
• Cost of Ownership – Analyze the cost of the DBMS based on the cost of licensing, support, hardware requirements, salary of DBA, and cost of additional software.