Klyde, you've made a very good point. I may very well be looking for another buzz term entirely that can at least provide a reasonably short and complete idea of what i'm looking for.
Allow me to provide a sense of what kind of application I'm trying to apply the terms to, and why I think that while "Enterprise Class" is not the right term, it's the only one I can think of right now.
One of our clients is an organization of about 60 people. Of these, the DB app we'll be building them will only be touched by about 25 out of this group. Of these 25, I would say that there will no more than 10 or 12 will have admin access to the really critical data. As a result, I would doubt there will ever be more than 5 concurrent users of the DB.
That being said, it may not be an exagerration to say that the sanctity of the data (security, consistency, maintenance, etc) is tantamount to life or death in some cases. If a record is lost or corrupted, then it could mean that a client's service is delayed, changed or at worse not delivered. For some of the organzation's clients this could be disastrous.
This is probably way overstated as they've been using a Clipper DB for the past 10 years without quite killing anyone, but it illustrates a point. The client could probably get away with an application like Filemaker Server or MySQL, but building a system using those tools might be irresponsible if you're looking to protect the data as completely as possible.
Probably the vast majority of OACS projects will fall under a category that is not really "Enterprise" in scope but do require levels of data security and maintenance that are found in traditionally enterprise class tools. The reason the OACS community is such a stickler for a true RDBMS, I might argue, is not because we're all trying to build Amazon.com but because we want the best tools to maintain the integrity of our systems.
John, I like your idea that "Enterprise Class" must also include support solutions, or at least access to support solutions. That's a very helpful point. Torben, I'll check out those books, thanks...
talli
