My company is in the process of wanting to build a decision support db/dw for a financial institution. Over the past 3 years I have been working on a decision support dw using Teradata for a division of the above company and have grown to love Teradata. The problem is data warehouse was so successful in giving a clear picture of the company that the financial institution determined this was not a profitable business to be in and dismantled the division.
I am now trying to help the culture of the financial institution understand that the same clear picture of the rest of their company would be great and is necessary. One of the big issues I'm running into is "we have an AS/400 DB2 system that holds all of our bank transactional data why don't we use this instead of Teradata." I have only had experience with Teradata and do not have any pros or con's for using DB2. I am hoping that some of you would be willing to shed some light on the subject.
Which db would you choose to build a decision support db on? And why?
lol, i would love to helpe you, but i'm afraid i'm a bit biased on this. Since i'm a AS/400 database developer (We call the AS/400-version DB/400 ;) ). I have no experience with Teradata, but i can tell you the pro's and con's of DB/400.
First of all AS/400 DB2 is, like the AS/400 stable and safe. I will say that again (hope some MSSQL-people read this :p ) stable and safe. Otherwise DB/400 is pretty much like all the other, highed, expensive databases. Just as fast and expensive as Oracle.
With using DB/400 you main problem will not be learning how to use DB2, but the AS/400 that runs it. I am well aware that a non-crash-able, green-screen, mouseless, commandline-operated server can be quite a shock to some people.
However the one big problem about DB/400 is it's manufacturer, IBM; good, reliable, expensive and completeley unaware of the world around them. :D