Is this the way Oracle always does business?

I recently had a strange experience with Oracle Corp., and wonder is this is to be expected.

Here's the situation: we run an insurance industry web page and have outgrown dbm and really need a full relational database with transaction rollbacks, good backup utilities, and all the other bells and whistles. And since many of the banks we do business with recommend Oracle, it sounded like a good choice.

Although we need a good, secure SQL product, our requirements are pretty basic (one location, small data tables). So spending tens of thousands of dollars for the Enterprise Edition seemed like overkill. So a friendly salesperson suggested all we needed was the "Oracle 7 Workgroup Server", available at a fraction of the cost. Seemed strange to me something so good was so cheap, but the explanation was that they were trying to get market share away form Microsoft, even it it meant taking a loss. Ok.

Things started getting murkier - we run the Netscape Secure Commerce Server on Sparc/Solaris, and the Workgroup server for Solaris isn't ready yet. So we were told we could get an NT version, and a free upgrade to the Solaris version when it came out. So we got an NT box, hooked it up to our TCP/IP LAN, and were all set to go (so we thought), the theory being the Perl CGI code on the Sparc would be able to talk to the Oracle server on the Sparc.

Guess what? Turns out the boxes don't talk to each other. After nearly five hours on the phone to Oracle today, I've heard everything from
"should run just fine with what ya got" to "no, that's impossible" to
"it can be done, but it is very difficult and you'll need a bunch of
other software that isn't cheap". And this is advice from the
"experts", the same ones who told me it would work when I bought it,
even though I had questions like "don't we need some sort of client software running on the Sparc?".

So what's the deal? If I can't get the right answers from Oracle, then where? I'm about to return everything and go to another vendor, but the folks I spke with at Sybase and Informix seemed not all that anxious to help when I tried to purchase their products.

The guys next door are running Netscape Server on a Sparc, and using Microsoft Lan Manager on NT as a database server, via the MS ODBC connectivity layer. Seems to work ok for them. What would the downside of this approach be (besides the political implications, a lot of the bankers I talk to don't like Microsoft products)?

I'm kind of dismayed by all this - I've been told by more than one person that Oracle makes a great product, but expect to spend large bucks up front, get nickle and dimed for maintenance, and be ready to hire expensive outside consultants to answer the questions Oracle can't (or won't). Makes doing business with Microsoft look a lot less unattractive.

Phil Glatz              (pglat_at_quickquote.com)
Software Engineer           Lake Tahoe, Nevada
Webmaster at www.quickquote.com
Voice 702/831-2404            Fax 702/831-8386