Good article, appreciate your writing about your experiences (sounds a bit tough, glad you survived).

 I think there is a need for more articles about the conceptual mapping: how does one do a job in SQL Server vs Oracle. SQL syntax is reasonably similar, but other operations are radically different. Most of my experience is in SQL server, but I am occasionally called on to do something in an Oracle instance and it can be a bit intimidating. For example I had to make an archive copy of an Oracle data model on the same machine under a different name (this was part of a third party application). In MS, I would simply do a .bak and restore it under a different name, but that does not seem directly mappable to Oracle. The way I finally did it in Oracle was a whole lot messier and I'm sure it's not the best way.