Selection of DW and analysis software?

[lcrans]

Hello, all.... (cross-posted from the DW forum)

We are an educational organization, several school districts joined together to share costs and development efforts related to curriculum and student performance analysis. We are currently looking for a DW/OLAP system, a way to pull together all our data and study it. And there is a question that has come up:

For roughly the same annual costs we have a choice between the following:

1) An existing education oriented DW/OLAP/Reporting system developed in SQL Server and .NET from a company with about 40 employees;
2) A to-be-developed system (in MySQL, PHP, HTML, and Javascript) to do what we say we want from a company of 8 employees that has developed other smaller application packages for some member districts.

What are your thoughts about selecting one of these options, and why? Your ideas will really be of value in out selection process....

Thanks....lcrans

 

[MDXer]

if choice #1 has a proven record with their software meeting your solutions why go through the headache of javing company #2 reinvent the wheel? SQL Server 2000 is proving itself to to be a reliable platform. I worked a project that had a 6Billion fact row DW that was based in SQL2k while there bug tracking software was based on MYSQL we had many more problems with the bug tracking system than we had with the DW. The .NET platform is also proving itself to be reliable and enables a users needs to be easily met.

Just my opinion,
Paul

Paul

 

[MarleneD]

Check out

http://www.dwreview.com

- they used to and may still have examples of dw set up