Re: Overcoming objections to Oracle

Edwin Greene wrote:
> 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.

Assuming you are in the US, Japan or Western Europe the first thing you should be thinking if in the banking industry is complying with required laws. (If US) are you compliant with SarbOx? How about FACTA? How about all of the other regs? I can't think of a single bank ... not BofA, not Washington Mutual, etc. that is not an Oracle shop.

There is zero excuse for any bank not being up 7x24 with fully redundant systems. I've worked with several of the majors and not once have I ever heard of the situation you are stating being tolerated.

Contact me off-line.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)