Downgrade from Enterprise to Standard

A company I am contracting with purchased a 3rd party app that uses Oracle for the backend. It turns out the vendor installed 8i Enterprise but, according to the invoice, only charged licensing for Standard (actually, all they left was a bootleg copy of the Oracle CD, but that is a whole 'nother story). Given the cost difference combined with the fact that there is no benefit to using Enterprise in this case, the company is obviously not wanting to pay for the vendor's mistake.

After pointing this out, the vendor claims they can come back in and downgrade the server from Enterprise to Standard. Now, a few years ago I worked for a software company that also packaged Oracle with the product, and I swear I was told once that you can upgrade but there is not way to downgrade. This would require an export/reinstall/import, and even that would fail if you were using any of the Enterprise features.

My fear is the vendor is going to come in and trash the server. Based on past experiences with these people I have zero confidence in their ability, but I don't want to challenge them on this if there really is a way to downgrade the software. If it wasn't for the loss of time and data (there is about 6 months of data in the database), I would gladly sit back and watch just to see them sweat when it doesn't work. Unfortunately I don't have that luxury.

Does anyone know for sure if this is possible or not?

Thanks Received on Fri May 31 2002 - 18:41:41 CDT