Case Study: Taking the Plunge/ CIW: Database Design Specialist

The management of Acme Widgets has agreed that a relational database management system should be implemented to track its customer and order information. Joe is now tasked with recommending a specific RDBMS. Joe conducts several interviews with management in order to put together a requirements document. He is able to ascertain the following:

• The preliminary budget is minimal.
• The preliminary schedule is tight (management wants the system in place as soon as possible).
• Company sales have been increasing rapidly (approaching nearly 10,000 widgets sold per day), so the product must be scalable.
• The product must run on Windows, but may one day be ported to a different operating system.
• The system must provide enough basic security to protect confidential data.

After reviewing his requirements document and investigating several database management systems, Joe recommends MySQL 8.0 because it is open-source (which satisfies the budget constraint) and because it can import data from the spreadsheets in which it is currently stored. MySQL also offers sufficient scalability, portability, and security. As a class, discuss Joe's recommendation of MySQL 8.0. What are the advantages of using an open-source product? What are the disadvantages? Based on the requirements document Joe has constructed, what other DBMS products (open-source or proprietary) might serve equally well for Acme Widgets Inc.?