Sybase - Don't go their. Their revenues are up due to their application server and portal technologies. Their DB market share is still declining.

Oracle - Strong market share and relatively good certification program.

SQL Server - Increasing it's market share but still well behind Oracle at the moment. If people continue to jum ship from UNIX to Windows it will take a bigger share of the pie. People have been badmouthing the Microsoft certifications recently so I'm not sure what employers think about them.

DB2 - Probably the closest to Oracle in terms of scalability and performance, some would say ahead of it. It's increased it's market share recently but is still not as big as Oracle.

In my opinion your choice should be between SQL Server and Oracle so pick the one you think your most likely to work with.

If you pick Oracle I would probably go for Oracle9i. By the time you get through the Track the number of Oracle9i installations will have increased.

Cheers

[Edited by TimHall on 06-13-2002 at 12:43 PM]