Among the most important technical decisions for most enterprise applications is how to efficiently structure and access data stored on the database. Get these decisions wrong, and the application could be doomed from the start to poor performance and high maintainence costs.
When choosing a data access strategy, we don't adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. We choose the access mechanism which is best suited to the type of application being built. Business applications which do many read-write operations on individual entities are well suited to an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool, while those which perform many reporting functions tend to be better suited to technologies using SQL directly. Similarly, stored procedures may be better suited to applications for which many operations are performed in batch mode.
We have extensive experience with Oracle, the most feature-rich database on the market. Our understanding of the Oracle architecture enables us write efficient database applications which maintain the integrity of your data. Our understanding of Java allows us to effectively apply this knowledge in a J2EE environment.
For firms on a tighter budget, we recommend PostgreSQL, the most advanced open source database and completely free of licence costs. PostgreSQL employs a similar architecture to Oracle's multi-versioned concurrency control which makes it suitable for transactional applications.
Our ORM tool of choice is Hibernate, an open source library which is easily comparable with leading commercial alternatives.