Technology has become a major part of today's society. Most of the information we see on the Internet comes from databases located somewhere in the world. Databases are the key to many things in the world, including video rentals, libraries, e-commerce, vacation booking, college, and more. Database administrators and businesses often need to decide which database system will best meet their needs. Some important topics to consider are: licensing and cost, user concepts/features, operating system capacity, data partitioning, and performance. MS T-SQL, MySQL and Oracle are some of the most commonly used database systems. MS T-SQL is a Microsoft relational database management system (DBMS). Since the system is closed source, it requires a license to use it. T-SQL performance is very complex. Quality Web Programming noted in its blog that a developer would need "good knowledge and efficient hardware, otherwise it would make the system difficult to use" ("Using MS SQL and MySQL"). For some businesses, this system may not be user-friendly. This would require the company to pay a higher salary to be able to implement and use this system. For small businesses or individuals, this just may not be something they can afford. MS T-SQL has user-defined functions. One of these user-defined functions is the ability to program modules. As noted in the article "User Defined Functions" found on technet.microsoft.com, "You can create the function once, store it in the database, and call it as many times as you want in your program.” Some developers would consider this a big advantage when working with database systems. This allows for faster execution...... middle of paper ...... Ozar stated on its website that "the Standard edition costs $7,499 per process (socket) [and] the Enterprise costs $28,749 per processor” (“SQL Server 2008 R2 Pricing and Feature Changes”). The difference with the Enterprise edition is that the buyer would benefit from support for eight processors compared to the four offered by the standard edition. The Enterprise edition offers a maximum memory usage of 2 TB compared to the standard 64 GB, and both editions offer a maximum database size of 524 PB. Additionally, the Enterprise edition offers support IA64 hardware load, resource governance, and partitioning of tables and indexes. There are many other technical differences between the two editions, but they will not be covered in this article. Another commonly used database is MySQL. This database system is an Open Source system and is easily accessible to any developer.