Hirano Sue seems to have died on 25th January this year ..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_supercentenarians
14 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2010
Surely serving a 1,000 customers can be done even with a simple microsoft access database file ;-)
At the stage they are it just doesn't matter yet what they use.
As long as you use a proper persistence/data access layer with business objects it is easy to swap the storage technology behind it. As your business grows you can then start caching objects and do hybrid approaches (mixing NoSQL/SQL) to increase performance as needed.
Couple of thoughts:
It doesn't sound like you have high requirements for the Database. I can pretty much assure you that if you are happy with the performance of an old ISAM instance then pretty much anything out there will do just fine for you. Do your customers a favor and pick something that is easy to manage/install - MySQL (or any of it's clones like MariaDB, etc), MSSQL Express and PostgreSQL come to mind.
IDE:
Embarcadero Delphi has been mentioned. You get Android/iOS/Mac/Win32/64 covered with that. It's not a bad environment to get the job done, but as some others already pointed out, it's not exactly a very popular development environment anymore and the future of it doesn't look too golden. Lazarus (the opensource clone of Delphi) has plenty of people actively working on it and looks better, but you don't get Android/iOS with that.
My recommendation is to go for .NET - .NET is a pretty awesome development environment. Millions of active developers use it and as far as language (C#), available libraries and peer support (from other active developers) goes it's probably the best choice out there right now. Contrary to what others above suggested i wouldn't go for web development (be that ASP.Net Forms or MVC). I love developing in MVC and it is what i mostly do right now, but even i have to admit that developing an application for the Web usually takes me 4-5 times as long as making an old style GUI application. Separating backend from frontend, making it stateless, AJAX'ed and look the same in all browsers(incompatibilities with browsers rendering HTML) takes a lot more time to get things done and unless you have good reasons for choosing that architecture (such as having thousands of customers and wanting a SaaS solution for them) then web development is *not* something i would suggest to you. (there are also performance implications - a web-gui always runs much slower than a native-gui).
Using the Apple logo is obviously not legal, but as far as i know Apple only trademarked the term "iPhone" only in conjunction with "mobile phones, digital audio player, electronic data-transmitting device, handheld unit for playing electronic games" ... so any company that wants could apply for the iPhone trademark for a gas stove ?!
"So far, what they have is something that is platform neutral, leveraging JavaScript and vulnerabilities within SQL to create a devastating impact on the targeted website."
If your website is open to simple XSS or SQL-injection attacks then DDoS should be the least of your worries.
My ISP is blocking port 21 (only allows access to their own mail server for sending out emails). If every ISP in this world would follow this very simple and effective method then SPAM would probably almost instantly cease to be a problem. Bootnet infected desktops would no longer be able to send emails directly to remote mail servers.
Looks like Oracle has a very short memory span .. so by their own new definition of fair java use their own old "Oracle JInitiator" product should have never been allowed to exist.
I am seriously in favor of abolishing patents for software processes - it's just stupid and hinders progress! Copyright law is sufficient for protecting software, there is no need for patents.
Also, what scares me is that Oracle is very well known for commercializing and making things profitable. Java ... and quite likely MySQL ... will most likely become very expensive products to use. This whole Oracle vs. Google thing is just the start of this process to squeeze some money out of it's SUN acquisition.