Wait on Oracle 10g Upgrade - ' Caution Rules IOUG Live ' (
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But the arguments on the other side, which call for the standard, cautious, wait-and-see, stay-away-from-dot-zero-releases attitude, are more compelling. They won the day, Im told, on the IOUG Live panel—run by Ian Abramson, director of education for IOUG—that closed out the conference. The panel was titled, "10g: Upgrade Sooner or Later … That Is the Question!"
I got two of the "later" panel members on the phone. Earlier in the week, they came up with a good acronym to describe their stance. Theyre calling themselves TCM: The Cautious Majority. Here are their very compelling arguments for going slowly:
Skepticism on the promised apps delivery dates.
Oracle is saying that Oracle applications are targeted to be certified on 10g by June. PeopleSoft applications are targeted for summer, and SAP is looking at Q1 2005.
Look at the fine print, though: Those applications are "targeted" for those release dates, not guaranteed. Maybe were a cynical bunch, but delivery-date slippage is too common not to anticipate here.
The patch sets arent worth much until the stuffs proved in production.
There just arent enough sites running this software in production to viably, thoroughly test it. As Carl Olofson, research director at International Data Corp., said in a recent TechTarget newsletter article (sorry, theres no link to give you, but if youre curious to see the article, e-mail me and Ill forward the newsletter), 10g probably wont show up in sales "for at least six months," since they like to wait for a maintenance agreement to be in place.
As one of the pro-go-slow panel members pointed out to me, its just not worth the risk of migrating if theres a potential for stability issues. "We completely agree that this version of the database may have been the most tested version," said Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha, an independent consultant in San Francisco.
"But we heard the same for Version 8 and Version 9. It may be true theyre increasing testing, but why would you subject your enterprise to upgrading to a new release if theres no driving business factor?"
Next page: And then theres the homogeneity problem.
