Mathias,

 

Here are some questions for you:

  - What type of platform are you most comfortable supporting - Unix, Windows, Linux?

  - How will the data for the large tables arrive? A flat (ASCII) file?

  - What is the time frame between the arrival of the data and the time the data must be ready for users?

  - Have you licensed Oracle yet? What type of license?

  - Will the large monthly data loads be kept for several months? If so, consider licensing Oracle partitioning.

  - How tight is your budget? Is your organization willing to pay a reasonable amount, or are you trying to get by paying very little money and are willing to spend more of your time keeping this application running?
  - What type of data access is needed (via Java)? How many users? What type of queries -- simple lookups of data or will the queries be sophisticated?
 

Dennis Williams