Pricing question?

Hi all,

A friend of mine is trying to get a job as a Linux Sysadmin in a certain company. This company produces document management software.

They have their own "database" maintained by a "consultant" who seems to have the company bent over a barrel with their trousers around their ankles (and a tub of vaseline provided by the company).

This "db" that he has written in C/C++ over 18 years is not documented, and basically my friend's job will be to try and get rid of their dependency on this db and ultimately on Mr Vaseline.

Apparently this db is *_his_* intellectual property and he made threatening noises about calling his lawyer if the system was looked at again by anyone but him (my friend took one look at the code and said "No way am I trudging through this mess...".

I know more about db's than he does (he's a sharp fellow nonetheless) and he was asking me about the ins and outs of db's &c.

I gave him a few options (different db's from Open Source ones to Oracle), his first question was "Which would be best for my c.v." to which I replied "Oracle". He wants to know about licencing costs, so what I would like to know is: What sort of discount can one expect on Oracle as a VAR?

Paul...

p.s. I also suggested that he could send the code to India or somewhere and pay someone to decipher it - any recommendations for this (offline please)?

-- 

plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__

XP Pro, SP 2, 

Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.2.0;

When asking database related questions, please give other posters 
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
 
Furthermore, As a courtesy to those who spend 
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do not top post.