Seeking advice on potential 10g upgrade

Hi all,

I used to be a regular reader of this list, but work took me in another direction and I've been away the last few months. However, life is circular and so here I am back again with another Oracle consulting job.

I have kept all of my clients on 9i up to now, because the last time I was reading this list there was still considerable skepticism about the stability of 10g, especially on Linux which is what all our installations use. But this new client wants to use 10g, so I have many questions. I tried to search the archives, but I came up with way too many matches and many were several years old and so probably out of date.

My questions... any insight would be much appreciated, as would links to resources that might help.

• is 10g on Linux ready for production use yet? If not, where are the problem areas?
• have people experienced any significant problems when upgrading from 9i to 10g?
• is there an independent source to read about the actual improvements in 10g over 9i (ie, not just what Oracle says has been improved)?

Basically, I have a situation where I'm telling the client "it's running well, let's leave it alone and put our efforts into other areas" and the client is chomping at the bit to upgrade to 10g because he thinks he is going to see lots of improvements. Areas where he says he expects to see improvement are:
- Oracle Text

• materialized views
• automatically managed tablespaces
• overall easier DBA

I've looked at the "new feature guide" for 10g Release 2 and I see some of these things mentioned, but of course that doesn't mean the improvements are actually significant or that they outweigh the stability risks of upgrading.

So, any and all suggestions, war stories, encouragement, etc welcomed! Pointers on good books for someone who is most familiar with 8i to get up to speed with 10g are needed also.

Thanks!!!

janine

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