Oracle Contractor's Estimate Too High ?

Help ! I'm not sure if my contractor's estimate for working on our database is accurate. I'm just a humble perl hacker and know just a little bit about database design. If any DBA's out there could read my dilemma and post a candid opinion, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance.

Here's my dilemma:

I am working on an internet project ( 24x7 high availability.. you know, the usual ) that uses perl scripts to access an Oracle database.

The database currently has tables with names such as WTDCOMM and fields with names like WTDPLNT. Needless to say, everything needs to be renamed.

The only documentation is a stack of pages that maps the field and table names to terse one sentence descriptions of what they mean.

Ex: WTDCOMM - Table of Common Names

There is no documentation about primary, foreign keys etc.

My only other resource is the SQL from the scripts which currently access the database. I also work with the person ( my boss ) who created the database so I can pick her brains about it when necessary.

The database consists of about 30 tables. Some tables have over tens of thousands of records, some only a few ( less than 20 ). The database and the tables were all set up using the default values in the Oracle Schema Manager.

Some of the fields have colon delimited values in them:

Ex: :these:are:the:values:in:this:field:

The assumption being that the programmer would use a like statement to search this field.

At some point, I realized that the database need to be overhauled, optimized for speed, made more better in general. I called in a contractor who looked at the database and said that just for the initial database design and data modeling it would take about 120 hours. At the time, I thought this was reasonable.

Today in a meeting, the head of the IT department said the he could do all of the design work in 4 hours and that the person who originally designed the database and I should be able to do it in a day.

Our in house sys admin gave us the opinion that it shouldn't be that hard and shouldn't take that many hours (120) and said most of our optimization would be in the SQL statments and not the database anyway. And that we could change things as we go if we need to.

So, am I being screwed by the contractor or does 120 hours seem reasonable for a contractor to come in, learn how things work, do the data modeling and help up set up the new database ? Please be as candid as possible. The difference between the 4 hours quoted by the head of the IT department and the 120 quoted by the contractor seems immense. Who's right ?

Thanks in advance !

Tim

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Share what you know. Learn what you don't. Received on Wed Sep 01 1999 - 20:40:28 CDT