We've decided that our first step would be to have each team member identify the key items necessary when building a data warehouse. From that input I will compile of list of priorities to make sure we bring up with each vendor. I'm curious as to what your list would be? Also, any insight into Oracle vs. UDB these days? QUESTION POSED ON: 20 OCT 2004
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Ian Abramson The database evaluation that you are doing is one that I feel will serve you well. We often start projects by determining the environment that we will be using, including the database. We review numerous features and each time they are different, depending on an organization's needs and standards. The following are some areas that we review when determining the database of choice:

Criteria Category	Description
Pricing	What does the database cost (software and hardware)? And what does it cost to support?
Capacity	What are the outer bounds of the database?
Scalability	How well does the product scale as data and user volumes increase? Does it support parallelism?
Loading performance	How fast can the database load data?
Indexing capabilities	What options are available in regards to data indexing and impact to performance?
High-availability features	What features or options are available to ensure that the database has the ability to run in a high-availability environment?
Data warehouse functionality	What features in the product make it well-suited to support a data warehouse environment?
Connectivity	What methods are required to access the database, either via the Web or in client/server mode?
Query performance	How well does the database process data warehousing queries?

I hope this helps you determine what works best for you. One thing you should also consider during your evaluation is that the above criteria will have weights given to each criterium based on the individual requirements of your organization and functions that you need to see.

As far as giving you guidance on Oracle vs. DB2, this is one of the great debates. I am a fan of the Oracle platform. I like Oracle for a number of reasons; however, I do understand that DB2 is right for certain organizations. I like Oracle for its reliability, easy of management, robust features, portability and performance. I know that people will argue that DB2 does everything that Oracle does, and this is true in a number of areas, but I truly feel that Oracle is a more robust and stable platform to deploy warehouses on. There are some evaluations that compare the products, but in the end you need to find what works for you.