>Hi Marc,
>
>>Oracle developer (forms + reports).
>
>Salary and future are probably in favor of Oracle. Fun and technology are more likely to find in C# positions.
>
>Oracle can be a very frustrating experience at the beginning. It's not a smooth integrated environment like VFP or Visual Studio. Oracle keeps changing the product with new releases. I worked with Oracle reports a few years back. With one version they changed charts to a new XML format without providing any migration path, at all. Redoing lots and lots of charts in existing reports isn't a lot of fun, especially not in complex Oracle reports.
>
>Version and platforms are another source of frustration. In one case, a report wouldn't print correctly on a Swiss Unix installation of Oracle, but on all other systems. Turned out there was a bug in a font mapping file. Bugs in general are a big problem. Oracle maintains different sets of sources for every platform (there are several Windows platforms, BTW). Bugs are fixed in some release and later rolled out to all other releases. Except sometimes, when they are rolled back and not added back in. Convincing Oracle that something is a bug and you don't need to reinstall the latest patch for the tenths time to proof this is also a hard job. It took us a lot of time to find out why right aligning in PDF reports would only work with even font sizes...
>
>Information is a further difficult issue with Oracle. Information you find are typically only on Metalink. There are very few freely available forums and knowledge bases available for Oracle. This is very different from VFP.
>
>If you go with the Oracle job make sure that you work for a real Oracle shop that does spend the money on training, tools and closed libraries including Metalink. Oracle is very hard to learn in your spare time without any resources. However, once you went through all this, knowing Oracle is a very valuable skill. And PL/SQL is soo much superior to T-SQL.

I agree with all your points save for the availability of forums. There are several on Oracle's web site itself. All you have to do is join Oracle Technology Network. Oracle is also freely available for download provided that it is being used for development and learning purposes only.

One other point. Oracle doesn't have any more Windows versions than any other product.

Regards,