Database Selection Survey

I am currently working on my Masters thesis in CS and part of my project relates to the database selection process. I'm trying to put together a list of questions to be answered when trying to select a database product. I put this survey together myself, so I'll admit up front that it is no way complete and comprehensive. The intent of this survey is to gather information pertaining to the selection of commercial software products, particularly RDBMSs. The results of this survey will be used to develop a software selection checklist that may be used to start the software selection process, ideally, for any application. To meet this goal, I am looking for responses from individuals in any area of the software industry so that I can generalize the checklist as much as possible. If anyone has any "lessons learned" from previous software purchase decisions, I would greatly appreciate any help! If you could please fill out the survey electronically and mail it back to me, I would appreciate it. Don't fell obligated to fill out the entire survey, if you don't want to. Any information would be appreciated. My e-mail address is: stephie@indigo.nrccso.com Thank you for your help. Stephanie Maloney ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Database Management System Evaluation Questionnaire General Information Your Name: Company: Position: Years of Software Experience: Years of Database Experience: Currently Used Commercial Software Packages: Currently Used RDBMS: Other RDBMSs Used: Current Application: (i.e., banking, defense, etc.): How would you characterize the majority of your experiences: General Software Selection 1. Did you have a say in the selection of a commercial software application for your company? 2. How many people use the product that was selected? 3. How would you categorize the application (DB, Word Processing, etc.) ? 4. How many people were involved in the selection? 5. Who was involved in the selection (managers, users, engineers, etc.) ? 6. Who made the final product selection? (customer, managers, etc.) 7. Was in-house development of the application considered? If so, why was the commercial product selected instead? 8. How were the requirements for the software defined? 9. Who was involved in the requirements generation process? 10. In your opinion, were the requirements sufficiently detailed to successfully make the selection? If not, how could the requirements have been better defined? 11. What was the single most important factor/feature that lead to the selection of the product? 12. What other features were of significant importance in the selection process? 13. How was the weighting of features determined? 14. How was information about the products gathered? (vendors, other users, etc.) 15. Is everyone involved happy with the selection? Database Section Criteria 1. Did you have a say in the selection of the current database product you are using or any other database purchase in the past? 2. What was the single most important factor/feature that to the selection of the database? 3. What other features were of significant importance in the selection process? 4. Is the database used for multiple applications? 5. How was information about the products gathered? (vendors, other users, etc.) 6. Is everyone involved happy with the selection? Database Product Features 1. Briefly describe the database application(s) you currently using or working on. The following questions relate to the requirements of the application you are currently working on or using. Don't feel obligated to answer every question, if you don't know the answer off-hand. Any other information you would like to include would be helpful. 1. Is portability important to your application? 2. What platforms does your application currently run on? 3. Are you required to use ANSI SQL? 4. What standard data types used? 5. Are user-defined data types required? 6. What types of integrity checks are important? 7. Do you perform updates through views? 8. Do you use database rules? 9. At what level are rules created? 10. How is user access controlled? Are "groups" used to control access? 11. What types of system administration tools are used? 12. Is data compression required? 13. Is the format of the database table constant or is it changed often? 14. Is a bulk loading utility utilized? 15. What common development tools are used as part of the DBMS? (Report Writer, CASE tools, 3GL precompilers, etc.) 16. Does your application use X-Windows? 17. What types of security precautions are required? 18. What is the average number of users on the system at one time?