In the interests of not making this a shopping list: please advise on "how" to choose a the right tool, as opposed to which is the best. E.g:
- Which questions should I be asking myself / client?
- What features should I be looking for?
Draft use case:
- easy setup / installation + easy to use
- size: 5-10gb database with 10-30 tables of varying sizes
- users: handful of beginner-intermediate SQL analysts
- load: 10-20 short-ish SQL scripts per day
- usually one user per table at any one time
- aspiration that SQL scripts should not take long to run
- 'fast' and 'flexible' more important than 'safe'
- abiliy to import/export from/to CSV
- low cost(!)
Essentially, we are a small team of (somewhat) geographically distributed data analysts looking for platform to do data preparation - we are not app developers. Data is exported for analysis in MS Excel.
Options considered so far:
- MySQL with phpMyAdmin on WAMP on my 3-yr old laptop, which was OK for one user but slow for some queries on larger datasets
- Google Cloud SQL - I have set up Tier D0 instance and connected phpMyAdmin from Compute Engine but found it slower than my desktop so far. Wasn't so easy to set up.
- Visual Foxpro - in the past with similar issues to (1) but more flexible; expensive.
- MS Access - some use but risk of 2gb size constraint
- Valentina Studio with SQLite - still testing; documentation confusing
What suggestions does the community have? Particularly intrested in comments on:
Desktop vs. Server vs. Web/Cloud (cloud seems like overkill, but option to access database anywhere is attractive)
SQL vs. other approach / language (SQL is easy to learn)
What other questions should I be asking but am not?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.