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.

I am now running an Oracle shop, but I previously spent 15 years in a multivalue shop. We never had data mysteriously disappear and our system data and uptime were rock solid and reliable.

 From my direct experience, Oracle has a lot of strengths, but the multivalue was faster on lesser hardware.

If you want to sell them on a different platform, focus on the business problems that will be solved, and not on the technology issues.

Cliff Received on Thu Nov 24 2005 - 14:38:48 CST