Re: Which Version To Target?

I know there are still customers who are using 7.1 (and likely some using 6.x) I suspect people will be using 8i for a long time to come - likely at least 5 years. There are people still asking basic 'how tos' about 8.0 in this forum..

As far as I can tell, all 8i warehouse & BI features have been ported forward to 9i. I consider 8.0 to have been the baseline for major warehouse capabilities, and 8i to be baseline for BI capabilities, which are finally reaching maturity in 9i. Any warehouse designs I do now depend on 9i only.

Some of the reasons I use for going 9i only:

• A warehouse, by design, has a multi-year life cycle. Why put something into production that will not be supported just when the user load starts hitting?
• A warehouse is not a static creature. The advanced in DDL handling make life a lot easier.
• The 'heterogeneous' capabilities of 9i (eg: directly reading a flat file) are realy, really useful in a warehouse.
• The performance improvements over 8i are significant.
• You can leverage RAC to get more horsepower without a design change. This is actually a fairly inexpensive route in the big picture. Much cheaper than buying the biggest boxes out there to support a large community.