Large databases

I've got a friend thinking about downsizing an enormous application from a 3090 to a Unix box, and he's thinking about using Oracle. I want to get y'all's reaction to this.

This application will has, right now on the 3090, several tables with up to 100 Million rows in them. Several of the reports require sorts of up to 50 Million rows at a time. Some of the extract programs transferring data between one table and another write temporary files of 7 Gig. This system is on the biggest 3090 available and brings DB2 to its knees. When my friend talked to an Oracle salesguy about porting this to a (big) Sun box, the Oracle guy said "Nooooo problem."

What do y'all think about this? Does this qualify as a big database anymore? Will Oracle for SPARC handle it? What are some issues that we may not be thinking about (i.e. not diskspace, MIPS, throughput, RAM, etc. but DB issues.)?

Thanks for your advice in advance...

                                                                Keith         

Keith Fulton           | "If we were in a court of law
711 Louisiana Ste 1300 |  arguing this out, I think I
Houston, TX  77002     |  would win.  It's that simple..."
kfulton_at_mgrm.com       |     (He did.)   Emmitt Smith #22


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