Hi,
I'm new to this whole database thing. I've been working at a company that runs AS/400 but they use some shitty JDA software for the "database". Mostly, I have a lot of experience using Access to get information to do maintenance and then export to Excel and have my staff manually copy & paste in corrections, etc.

So, now I want to move on to something real. DB2, Oracle, SQL Server...I don't know. So I'm asking for any advice.

I don't have a IT background at school (actually was a film production major - ha ha!), but I've always been using computers late 1970s and I'm really fast learner and user (really am the tech support for my department and quite certain I know more things about Windows than some of the IT help desk people).

My questions:

1) Where can I find information on how/what DB2 does on an AS/400 system? I've been to IBMs web site but the talk about it is waaay too complicated for me to understand. I've heard it's included with AS/400, but I don't understand how or how you use it. Can anyone point me to a more simple explanation?

2) Thinking of taking training to learn a more real, enterprise database program but don't know which. As I mentioned, my office has an AS/400 but they don't seem to use (can't use?) the DB2 functions of it. So I was thinking Oracle or SQL Server. But can you really learn either of these programs using the downloaded trial versions at home? Has anyone done this? If not, what sort of position at a company would have that kind of access?

Umm... I guess that's it!
Much thanks in advance. If anyone also knows a good web site other than these forums for newbies, that would be cool to.

Thank you,
Mark

You can only run SQL Server on a Windows Server box. Although SQL server is the easiest to use 'out-of-the-box' and the easiest to tie in with MS query and Excel etc .... it is not as good when you're handling lots of data (millions of rows) over many locations.

You can get DB2 and Oracle for all the unix platforms inc AS400 and these verions can make better benifit from the 64-bit OS and multiple CPUs in an MPP environment. They will also scale further and allow much better use of partitioned tables etc ...

The first questions you need to ask are:
1) How much data do you need to store and how much needs to be transfered in and out of the database
2) What user applications need access to the data, and how might people need access in the future.

try http://searchdatabase.techtarget.com/