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Business case for Oracle Database upgrades

Michael Hillenbrand EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Michael Hillenbrand

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QUESTION POSED ON: 07 August 2007
How can I make a business case to convince my top management that the time to upgrade all our production Oracle 9i (9.2.0.4) databases to Oracle 10g is now? They are looking for the top five reasons to upgrade. How can I prepare a convincing report?

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I hate to answer a question with a question, but in order to write a good business case for an upgrade, you need to know yourself why you want to upgrade. So, why do you want to upgrade? Is there a business reason to do so or do you just like to stay current on versions?

Effort and cost always have to be weighed against the risks of doing nothing. All top-level management will want to see a good business case, complete with a what-happens-if-I-do (how much will it cost) and what-happens-if-I-don't (what is the risk?) scenario.

One place I can recommend that you start for why to upgrade is support. Oracle will only support the latest release of 9i (9.2.0.4 already falls out of this category), and with the release of 11g, full support for even the terminal release of 9i has already been terminated. However, you still have a few years of extended support, so you must have additional reasons, and to come up with those reasons, you need to answer the following questions:

  • Are there bugs in 9i that are causing outages and/or business impacts?
  • Are there features in 10g that would improve the bottom line of the business?
  • Does the application you are running run on 10g?
  • What would the development effort be to upgrade, test and verify the application?
  • Do you need to keep up with security patches for compliancy issues, such as SOX or HIPAA?

Upgrading to Oracle 10g? Read our Database upgrade guide.


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