Overcoming objections to Oracle

I recently took a job as an IT manager for a financial institution in the United States. I will be acting as the senior project manager until I get a feel for things, and then I will take over as the departmental head. The current departmental head is a semi-paranoid multivalue zealot who has done an excellent job of making this organization utterly dependent upon him. He has been described by his collegues as a despot. He justifies his obscene salary by pointing to the lack of multivalue programmers in our area. Recently, some critical data simply "disappeared" from our database. More likely it was accidentally lost as a result my colleague's poor programming, but I digress.

  At my former position, which was also a financial institution, we used Oracle. I am not a DBA, but I do know that oracle is very good at what it does. In six years, we never had a single major incident. Most likely, this was due to our oustanding Oracle team. Obviously, I want to migrate this organization to Oracle too. Of course, it will be a huge task that will take years, but considering the subservient position the senior leadership is in because of this common bad IT situation, it's the best choice.

How can I overcome the classic arguments about the benefits of multivalue over SQL? I am quite aware that Oracle can be just as fast, but how do I couch this in terms that will be agreeable to the senior management? They have spent the last ten years under the impression that no scalability, frequent outages and disappearing data are the norm and unavoidable on any platform.

  I could really use some help from the experts here. Thanks very much for any guidance you can offer. Received on Sun Nov 20 2005 - 15:17:32 CST