Hi.

I've done some simple benchmarks for Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and Access (for a laugh). For basic operations like a few thousand inserts, updates or queries the products in order of speed from fastest to slowest were:

Access
SQL Server
DB2
Oracle

Once you start dealing with tables much bigger than 10,000 rows you start to see:

Access
DB2
Oracle
SQL Server

If you take into account multiple users and locking you get:

DB2
Oracle
SQL Server
Access

If you increase the complexity of the queries you get:

Oracle
DB2
SQL Server
Access (Can't perform some complex queries)

These bench marks are crappy and I wouldn't quote them as being definitive, but you should try them out for yourself if you can. It gives you a clearer perspective when people start the old "my RDBMS is better than your RDBMS" debate.

Turns out, for something small with few users Access is the fastest choice. Not surprising really since it's not bogged down with needless complexity.

For small to mid multiuser systems SQL Server is the fastest and cheapest alternative. If you think your system might grow over time you may need to consider something bigger?

Very big DBs with simple queries are best served by DB2, although Oracle is very close in terms of performance.

Anything big and complex is best served by Oracle.

Food for thought!