Multiple Questions about Oracle

My company is thinking about changing databases from Sybase. I was wondering if some of you could comment a bit on some features of Oracle.

One thing we hear is that Oracle has a high cost of ownership. The database is feature-rich and we were wondering if that caused problems in that its harder to administer. Do you have any opinions on that? Does it take more and better DBAs to administer? Is the learning curve high?

Also another thing we hear about Oracle is that because they're #1, they don't try as hard especially in the area of support. Can any of you comment on the quality of Oracle support especially for PeopleSoft applications?

I'm also interested in your take on Oracle's implementation of Object technology. They haven't built in inheritance or polymorphism. Is anyone really using their object features for anything meaningful?

Also, are people generally pleased with Oracle's wide-range of options for coding stored procedures and triggers? Are packages really more efficient and make it easier to maintain code? Does the exception handling work as advertised?

Another thing that Oracle tells us is that we won't need to use temporary tables as much as we do in Sybase because Oracle can efficiently join more than 30 tables at one time. That's quite a claim. Is it true?

Oracle uses trigger-based replication. Do you know of anything negative about it? Does it perform well? How about when there are multiple triggers on the primary table? Does that impede performance?

And last of all, will an Oracle implementation demand more hardware than a comparable implementation in Sybase? Oracle seems so feature-rich that it looks like it might like more memory and disk.

Thanks ever so much!

Ledare King Received on Tue Oct 13 1998 - 21:01:46 CDT