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In pushing for a fast migration to 10g, Jacobs also pointed to the calendar for the expiration of 8i, a database version that a "substantial minority" of customers are still running. Support for 8i was set to expire at the end of December 2003 but was extended to the end of this year after the company announced 10g. Oracle is encouraging 8i customers to migrate directly to 10g without stopping at 9i for a number of reasons: First, support is running out. Second, its simple, Jacobs said. "The assumption that [migration] is difficult is wrong," he said. "Its very straightforward. We have a migration utility that makes sure all the software has its prerequisites met, and post-install checking" ensures that the installation went smoothly. George Trujillo, president and CEO of Denver-based Trubix Inc., which is the worlds largest third-party provider of Oracle educational materials, said he agrees for the most part with the migrate-early message. At the Toronto conference, Trujillo will be a member of panel discussing whether to upgrade to 10g sooner or later. "[My answer] is sooner, but let me qualify that," he said. "First, if youre running third-party applications, they need to be certified before you migrate to 10g. Youre not migrating until thats taken care of." Another reason to migrate early is that all enterprises are trying to reduce costs, database administration and downtime, he said. "Most organizations have reduced DBA [database administrator] staffs significantly over the past two or two-and-a-half years," Trujillo said. "If there are any lower-profile databases that arent mission-critical, they are ideal candidates for the self-managing features in 10g that will reduce administration." During his keynote, Jacobs also pointed to a manageability study done by Progressive Strategy that found that Oracle Database 10g is easier to manage than Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server relational database. The study clocked the time it takes database administrators to do a range of tasks, including tuning, backup, recovery, installation and so forth. The study, which was funded by Oracle, found that on average it took 30 percent less time to run tasks on Oracle than on SQL Server. Thats surprising, given that Oracle has been notorious for creating databases with a mind-boggling array of knobs to turn, Jacobs noted. "It takes manageability off the table as an issue," he said. "It is and it isnt surprising. We certainly put a big, big focus on this, on manageability, for several years now, and its culminated in the technology in 10g." Check out eWEEK.coms Database Center at http://database.eweek.com for the latest database news, views and analysis. Be sure to add our eWEEK.com database news feed to your RSS newsreader or My Yahoo page: