What’s the Best?

I monitor a number of different database discussion forums and you can always find a healthy debate on the best database platform. The problem with this question is the answer is always, it depends. It depends on the business and technical requirements today and over the next few years. We just published a case study on a company called Arabah. Arabah is is the official U.S. distributor of the Jericho by Paloma line of beauty products made from Dead Sea minerals. Arabah started down the path with MySQL but as they began to compare the business and technical requirements to what MySQL offered they realized it wasn’t the correct choice. I’m sure you know how the story ends. The morale of this story isn’t that SQL Server 2008 is a better database platform than MySQL (even though it is), it’s that you must first define your requirements before you select your solution. Now does anyone know what’s the best car?