Is the customer Microsoft-centric? SQL Server all the way. No-brainer in Microsoft shops, ad it has fantastic developer tools. It has always been my favorite since the move from 6.5 to 7. 2005 and above is just tasty.

Is the customer filthy rich and the application has to serve ten gazillion people? Oracle is the way to go. Oracle is cool because the same RDBMS runs in all kinds of big iron servers. You can start with a small Windows server, then if the business takes off, move on to big Windows, then to Unix, etc. and still run the same RDBMS. If you try to do this with SQL Server you'll be moving from Windows to bigger Windows to lots of Windows.

The one thing that always drove me nuts about Oracle: the user tools were designed by morons. This forced people to get REALLY GOOD at using the CLI. The end result is a generation of Oracle ninjas, which as a by product meant that the first generation of GUI tools that came from Oracle were, well, crap. Java-based crap. We are talking over 200MB of crap to install on a machine simply so it can be a client. I have no clue how it is now, but as of 4-5 years ago I knew Oracle DBAs that would rather use the Data Transformation Services tool in SQL Server to transfer data between two Oracle data sources, since it was less painful than doing it through the Oracle provided GUI tools.

Of course, from the bad came the good. A company called Benthic came out of nowhere with a really decent set of tools, really cheap too, that put Oracle basically on par with SQL Server 7 and 2000. God bless them.

Is the customer cheap or would rather spend money on development than on licenses? Either MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Can't argue with cheap, and you can pay for commercial support for both databases. If you are dealing with the *nix world, odds are you will probably spend more time looking at MySQL and PG than anything else.

Also, PG is object oriented, this raises all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Do I hate my customer and I want to doom him and make his life hell? Filemaker. My previous employer had ten years of business contacts, leads, follow ups, etc. on one single lousy Filemaker database, which would get corrupted every few months. What doomed the database is that Filemaker lets you do whatever you want, even if it is stupid from the point of view of database design. The end result is ten years of duct-taped programming by people that don't know a thing about database programming concepts.

I imagine that in the hands of a qualified programmer you can do magic with Filemaker, but in the hands of a dumbass it has no limits. It has more potential for mayhem than Access.
Source(s):
Too many years dealing with this issue.

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