Stuck on old system can you feel my pain

Hello,

<rant>

I have been using (living/breathing/sleeping) Oracle a long time...I love it!!!

Has anyone been associated with an entity that for some reason was stuck on an old version of Oracle in some (or all) parts of their business.

The "vendor" for a mission critical systems we have (purchased in 1999) deployed it on 7.3 on HP-UX at the time...and when they "upgrade" our application (they make a huge big deal about this and run some scripts-you know the drill) they never upgrade the instance, but run an upgrade script to create new objects...and give a new but almost identical FFFAAATTT client (that people run around and install).

Now the system is going to be sunset for development (buy the new one and get features-this new one should be an upgrade!) but we will have it for a while w/their support for both the app and Oracle...and they give a BS answer and smirk when I ask if they will upgrade the DB, and others at the entity (non-tech) do not really care (or understand) what version of Oracle and accept the answer...hey things are working in this complicated (it does do a lot) system and vendor gives "support" for DB and app.

I run 9I for my own DB's and will go to 10g...but forced to keep an 8I instance around to link to the 7.3 (9Ir2 connections to 7 are not supported, and some issues do pop-up when you do it)....and I warehouse this data and also often get things real time.

I find it ridiculous and want to use new features (or even reasonably old features) when I work w/the data in the application in real time.

I would love if they even upgraded (this sounds like a joke) to 8.0!!! so I could connect via 9IR2...

7.3 is so old that this is not strange, it is nuts....

The entity is actually responsive to most IT issues...but is semi-held-hostage from the vendor of their most mission critical and multi-functional system.

</rant>

Comrades, any experience like this, tips for connecting to old servers (post in server newsgroup for this reason) or tips in dealing w/the vendor?

I see know reason why they could not upgrade a version or two (they claim testing a sunsetted product), what works in the old version should work in the versions a few notches up. Do you agree?

Thanks,
Ranting Once Received on Mon Feb 02 2004 - 18:35:59 CST