>Yup, I knew they had done that. Any feel for hidden costs? Additional training, more complicated setup both on the server and workstations, increased development time/complexity vs. SQL Server, DBA, etc.

All I have to go by is salary for Oracle DBAs which is quite nice for a good one [$80K and up]. Managing an Oracle server is much like managing an NT, Unix or Netware server. Once Oracle is installed, management is mainly through a GUI. Oracle has made vast improvements in DBA management of the software. We have 2 DBAs and 1 backup [who is rarely around] to manage 2 or 3 servers each running 1 Oracle instance. I would guess these folks spend about 90% of their time doing other things [getting all the anti-virus software updated and working correctly on all our computers for one thing].

We have the Oracle connection products on servers that users are already logged into. All we do is create a search map to these directories at login. Then all that is left is to pop a file into their registry. Whenever Oracle releases updates, we just copy these to the servers.

The rest is generally management of users, assuring sufficient server disk space and other resources. Backups occur at night and are automated as part of overall server backup.