Choosing the right tools for a database application

[MoF]

I need to create a database application for a mid-sized company. After giving it a lot of thought I decided to make it a web database application running locally on their intranet.
This company has a database in Access and it has starting to reach its limits.

My question is what language, platform, database to use? I'm more comfortable working with MySQL and PHP or JSP, but I'm a little worried about database-size and many users accessing the database issues, if there are any with MySQL.

The database has as top around 5000 records in its biggest tables. There will be 8-10 people accessing it as different users with different privileges.

I've spent a lot of time on Google trying to find some answers. I noticed that MS SQL Server is probably the best solution because it supports everything I need, but my problem is that I haven't used it before and I don't know much about ASP.NET or C# and on top of that it seems more complicated than using MySQL and PHP or JSP.

Do you have any suggestions about what language and database is the best to use in this case? Is MySQL and PHP or JSP going to do the job, or will there be any problems with many users accessing the application or with the size of the database?

I'm really confused, cause it's my first real-world project after graduating from IT University. Thank you for your time.

[Orjan]

PHP, MySQL JSP won't have a problem as long as the hardware and the configuration is set up properly. for 8-10 users, I'd say just about anything would do. I guess a normal server today could easily handle over 300 web users without slimming performance settings

MS SQL/IIS with ASP/ASP.NET could do the job as well, no doubt. everything is about costs and languages to be used. MSSQL/Windows Server costs lisences, MySQL/PHP on Linux costs no licenses.

[MoF]

Thank you for your reply. I think I 'll go with MySQL and php, considering that it is much more easy to develop a web application in. I really hate all the dragging and dropping (the writing of code on it's own) in Visual Studio anyway (that's what I remember from my little experience with it).

On top of that I think MS SQL Server is offering more than I will ever need to use and I find it a little bit complicated to use.

Thanks for the feedback

[Orjan]

Yes, I don't think MySQL/PHP will limit you.

[xsonline]

8 to 10 people won't really be a problem for a MySQL database. If, however, you want to have a very high performance, and you have a big database (let's say more than 100MB of content), it could be usefull to consider Oracle Express. Oracle is known to be the most performant database system for big databases, and many users. This is due to some (minor) differences in the way data is stored.