Database Choices

[KHeathe673@aol.com]

Bob Edis has made some very sensible suggestions (other than the Oracle RDB info :)  

I especially applaud his suggestion that  the cost of support/technical personnel should be considered.

I ranted this one until I was blue in the face(no pun intended Bob) at home in Ottawa Canada. AFter building a Materiel Mgt system for our federal Jails, with 6 Alpha servers, Interbase and a largely happy group of approx 2000 users, and 6 years of effort, I was informed that the Government of Canada had decided it was now going to Buy rather than build systems.  And in order for departements to get funding, they would have to throw out whatever systems they had, and move to the following list in order of preference:

1.  SAP
2.  Oracle Financials/Mfg...
3   Other smaller ERPs

Now apart from the cost of throwing out perfectly good systems, the cost of an SAP implementation (which was estimated at 18 million per department ) they did not consider the cost of SAP implementor staff, which at the time was about $150 per hour.  The cost aside, they are still constantly struggling with getting people with this expertise, since its a manufactured by SAP shortage (you have to be a customer to get training).

So good for you Bob, good point.

By the way , they did throw out the PH system which had cost 1 million over 6 years to build, and went Oracle Financials.  Our Tax dollars at work !


Kent Heatherington