"Why Oracle?"

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Permalink Reply by Eddie Awad on February 2, 2008 at 1:18pm

Nice list! I would also include the very important and fundamental topic of data concurrency and multi-versioning.

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Permalink Reply by Savas Külah on February 4, 2008 at 2:25am

Especially this presentation will be good for beginner. I attended your two seminars before, like them this presentation will also be useful.

I want to attend this presentation.

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Permalink Reply by Ozgur TUGRUL on February 4, 2008 at 9:56am

i think, one of the most important thing is, oracle guarantees no data loss if it's running in archivelog mode .. :)

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Permalink Reply by Derya Oktay on February 4, 2008 at 11:12pm

IMHO, maybe Oracle streams, Oracle utilities (like dpimp/dpexp, imp/exp, sql loader) may be added.

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Permalink Reply by Yas on February 5, 2008 at 4:14am

I think a presentation like this should also answer the question "Why not any other RDBMS?". You can focus on the advantages and compare them with other databases.

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Permalink Reply by Billy Verreynne on February 6, 2008 at 11:25am

Selling a product and listing too many features, confuses.

Marketing 101 says (yes, was a product manager in the distant past) that you sell a product by its differences - in other words, not punting me-to features, but me-different-and-better features.

I've "sold" Oracle like this to many a developer by using a very simple differentiator - readers do not block and writers only block another writer when both are vying for the same row. I tell/show them how SQL-Server works. I tell/show them how Oracle works.

This difference is like night and day - and the benefits and advantages very clear and apparent. The often remark after this is a developer asking with a frown.. "then why do people use SQL-Server?".

Then I add the icing.. PL/SQL. A full blown "formal" language with tight SQL integration, object orientated programming features, built-in web browser, e-mail client, IPC pipes, message queues, job management, etc.

Finally I add the cherry. Scalability. Briefly describe what RAC is and the difference between a shared-everything cluster and shared-nothing cluster.

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Permalink Reply by TongucY on February 6, 2008 at 11:34am

Thank you Billy and all who commented, yes I will be concentrating on locking and concurrency with multi-versioning. I will get the assistance of Tom Kyte's beautiful examples from asktom.

Also I forgot to mention metalink in the list, I do not know other vendors support sites but when I have metalink with me I feel like no problem can break me :)

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Permalink Reply by Hans Forbrich - old ID on February 6, 2008 at 6:13pm

> Selling a product and listing too many features, confuses.

Yes. But WHAT is a feature? And WHAT is selling?

The only successful sale is one that links 'features of product' to 'desires of purchaser' . And the way to get that sale is to find out those desires - which may have absolutely squat to do with the capability of the product,

One very distinct feature is "it is popular". Not necessarily a capability, but one that sells a whole pile of product. One very distinct feature of 10gR2 is 'currently supported' without an extended support surcharge.

When creating a presentation to an audience, know your audience and find out what turns their crank. If this is to managers, then the features I'd include are
- has SQL so we can do a lot more with fewer lines of code
- has PL/SQL so we can do a lot more close to where the data is
- has packages so we can avoid recreating (and maintaining) really basic stuff
- then list some of the packages that are relevant to the current projects.

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Permalink Reply by Billy Verreynne on February 7, 2008 at 8:38am

Agree fully Hans. It depends on who you are making the sale to.

But I would not be using a half-a-day presentation and a tons of technical features as the basis of my sales pitch to management types. So I assumed (maybe incorrectly) that this is about selling it to developers.

If this is a management sell, I would make in short and sweet. About how this will be cutting down on development costs, will increase application performance, and provide for unparalleled scalability, availability and redundancy. And then the good stuff about support options, and the huge Oracle job market to tap for skills.

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Permalink Reply by Stew Stryker on February 12, 2008 at 5:00am

Billy Verreynne wrote: built-in web browser? e-mail client??? Built into Oracle? Where? For the email, do you mean the plsql_mail package?

For me, the most compelling reason to use Oracle is: It's what my employer uses!

But as for a selling point: Oracle is used so universally that the company can always find skilled employees. That's not so easy with some less-used databases. I think of that as a factor in return-on-investment, because it lowers the cost of getting software developed and maintained.

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Permalink Reply by Fernando J. Andrade on February 12, 2008 at 5:12am

I just gave a course of OEM Grid Control, and one of my students was for sales. I asked him about OEM licensing, and he said that's included on the licensing cost, even more that there's not in the licensing list as a product. The management packs for the database are other history, and also de service level pack, provisioning pack, and management pack of OEM alone.
Having a one central console for all my databases with mostly all the information I need is for me a killer feature ( I want to remark ONE).

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Permalink Reply by Erich Kitzmüller on February 15, 2008 at 1:51am

PL/SQL being much better than anything the competitors have to offer.

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