What are the major risks of implementing an RDBMS in an enterprise?

What are the major risks of implementing an RDBMS in an enterprise? Are these risks present across all vendors or are the risks vendor-specific?

Sid Adelman's Answer: The risks listed below are very much vendor-specific.

Risk 1 - The demise of your chosen RDBMS. If your RDBMS is acquired by another company, you will probably eventually have to convert - a painful and expensive process that brings little value to your organization.

Risk 2 - The inability of the RDBMS to perform and support your service level agreements. This includes response time, inability to support a given number of concurrent users, inability to meet performance windows, inability to support a high availability system, and inability to expand.

Risk 3 - This involves the RDBMS support of critical application packages and ERPs. If your ERP vendor does not consider a particular RDBMS to be important, they will not test as well and will not consider that RDBMS in functional and performance improvements.

Risk 4 - Vendor support. Some RDBMS vendors have an excellent reputation for customer support - others do not.

Sid Adelman is a principal in Sid Adelman & Associates, an organization specializing in planning and implementing data warehouses, in data warehouse and BI assessments, and in establishing effective data architectures and strategies. He is a regular speaker at DW conferences. Adelman chairs the "Ask the Experts" column on www.dmreview.com. He is a frequent contributor to journals that focus on data warehousing. He co-authored Data Warehouse Project Management and is the principal author on Impossible Data Warehouse Situations with Solutions from the Experts and Data Strategy. He can be reached at (818) 783-9634 or visit his Web site at www.sidadelman.com.

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