Oh please, let's not involve the universities! Seriously, I am tired of the better than you attitude of American universities. From trying to control the political spectrum to engaging in overcharging students so professors can spend their time chasing dreams - I do not see much value in them. My opinion only, but I prefer for working people, who actually understand what it means to hold a job, to come up with solutions to problems.

As to your concerns, I just don't get it. I move data from system to system reliably every day. Between CSV and XML, not to even mention EDI, I am able to share data between systems with very little effort. One of my systems even allows for feeding PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, JPG, TIFF and other formatted documents into it with very little effort. Mostly I work with SQL Server, but I have moved data from systems before where I had no access to the relational model, and had to examine the data to determine what to do to create what I needed. In that case I actually restored data that the vendor was unable to find.

For those systems that don't support importing data natively, why are we buying them? For those that don't support exporting data, what do we expect? Should a vendor provide a product that allows you to extract the data in order to move to another vendor's product? We may want that, but do you really expect a company to ease your transition to a competitor?

Admittedly my experience where I work is going to be different than in another industry, but I wonder if the issue is one of true need. Nobody said being a DBA would be easy.

Dave