Oracle thinks we need these products - opinions please.

  We are in the midst of negotiating a new licensing agreement with Oracle. Their salesmen are pushing our management to go with Parallel Server and also the database management packs. I would like pros and cons from those of you who have experience with these Oracle products.

OPS - As far as I am concerned, we don't need it. It adds some administrative headaches. However, Oracle is claiming that it is much easier to install and use with 8i. My argument is that if we can afford 3 minutes of down time while we fail our database over to another node in the cluster, then we don't need OPS. We are in a Compaq Tru64 clustered environment. We can fail our databases to another node automatically in minutes. We don't need to distribute the work load across nodes. Since I don't have first hand experience with OPS, I can't tell management what the "costs" will be to implement it (using raw devices, upgrading, etc.). Are there any, or is it pretty simple to implement?

Management Packs - I played around with OEM when it first came out and found it to quite buggy. I believe you need OEM to use the management packs. Is anybody happy with OEM? Do you like the management packs better than 3rd party tuning products?

Thank you

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Jay Hostetter
Oracle DBA
D. and E. Communications