Commercial DBMS

Microsoft SQL Server is my recommended database management system for all new development. It can be obtained and deployed free-of-charge, as Express Edition, for single-CPU processing of databases up to 4GB in size. It has all the main features of the higher editions of SQL Server, and if your requirements grow beyond its capacity, no further development will be necessary to upgrade to one of these editions. The Standard and Enterprise editions are not cheap, but they are so far ahead of the open source competition in vendor support, development facilities, performance and robustness that it is a false economy to spend my or your developers’ time coding solutions for other platforms, which will have to be thrown away when your business grows beyond their capacity, simply to save a few thousand pounds on licence fees.

Open Source DBMS

If you absolutely must use an open source DBMS, I would recommend PostgreSQL. It is now available in a native Windows version, and has a proper transactional database engine, and a full implementation of SQL, with support for stored procedures and triggers. Although the most common open source DBMS, MySQL, has now added some of these features, it still lacks basic data integrity checks, and its implementation of SQL is very far from the standard. It also requires a licence fee to be paid (although very low compared to Microsoft SQL Server) for commercial use, whereas PostgreSQL is unconditionally free for deployment.

Application Servers

The integration of SQL Server with the Microsoft ASP.NET platform on Internet Information Server (IIS) allows us to provide rapid development of powerful web applications. Again, there are open source alternatives such as Apache, but the development time which is required to overcome the lack of facilities which have long been standard in the Microsoft environment, and the poor support from the open source world, makes it difficult to recommend unless you are prepared to spend over the odds on development time to save money on server licences. If you insist on a non-Microsoft platform for web development, I would recommend Apache Tomcat and Struts with PostgreSQL as the back-end database server.