Recently I spoke with one of the Oracle Developers I know and asked him why are Oracle people so sold out to the product and act as if they will never change? His response was about speed with huge data bases and complex queries.

But when I asked about the cost of ownership, he took a turn. It sounded tome that the soft spot in the Oracle area is not performance nor is it usability, but cost and how the licenses for this product and that product adds cost. At one point he said that they had a tool that added no value but it made a few things easier to read, but still cost thousands of dollars.

Oracle has to have the cash from database revenue because the product line is very thin in comparison to Microsoft. MS SQL appears to have taken market share from Oracle and is still attempting to take more. This strategy could be interesting.

Bottom line if you have two products that both will do the job with reasonable execution time, and one costs less then half the other the decision is not that hard to make. I know about investment in a database and the cost of conversion. But still cost drives the bus not preference of the DBA. It is a hard life but if the bottom line is to make money the DBA can be replaced if they will not retrain.

Apologies for being so direct but profit is the goal and we have to live with that.