I have a requirement to develop a .NET-based application whose data requirements are likely to exceed the 4 gig limit of SQL 2005 Express Edition.
There may be other customers of the same application (in the future) with a requirement to use a specific DB platform (such as Oracle or SQL Server) due to in-house DBA expertise.
Questions
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What RDBMS would you guys recommend? From the looks of it the major choices are PostGreSQL, MySQL or FireBird. I've only got experience of MYSQL from these.
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Which ORM tool (if any) would you recommend using – ideally one that can be swapped out between DB platforms with minimal effort? I like the look of the entity framework but unsure as to the degree to which platforms other than SQL Server are supported. If it helps, we'll be using the 3.5 version of the Framework. I'm open to the idea of using a tool such as NHibernate. On the other hand, if it's going to be easier, I'm happy to write my own stored procedures / DAL code – there won't be that many tables (perhaps 30-35).
Best Answer
I suggest using NHibernate with postgres.
You can do all your testing and development on sqlite so you don't need to have an instance of postgres running on your dev machine.
If you aren't sure if you want to use mysql or postgres, I suggest trying them both out. Postgres is more compliant, but if you're comfortable with mysql (and you're using an ORM), you should probably use that.