[noodle]

its kind of hard to describe, lengthy, and it could just be my own limited experience.

lets just go with this -- typically, when a company makes the decision to go with oracle, they've made it for business/marketing reasons, not technical reasons. and this is probably how they're going to make the majority of the rest of their decisions.

[fiveo]

I understand and well aware of that. Having said that, I also often see companies purchase Oracle for technical and business reason. I went and saw myself first hand experience a multi-financial company that opted for Oracle (as opposed to SQL-Server, which they benchmarked) to build their financial system and they are pleased with that.

No argument between TDD, BDD, DDD, C# vs Java, Linux vs Windows, Commercial vs FOSS and all that crap. Just Oracle, PL/SQL, Forms, and Oracle Financial. There's no Java code at all around there. Pure "module" based. Testing is a lot easier vs to test your own "financial" module written in JEE.

I see it as more practical and suits the business well.

Of course if the business requires infinite customization (in the case of that crazy idea called Business Process Redesign), then maybe hiring a team of software developer is better than buying Oracle.

[noodle]

again, its tough to explain. but, i mean, i don't know much about your situation. it may well be an upgrade. i dunno.

if you're fine with sitting down and grinding things out, not really solving problems, do what you're told, etc, then, its not bad.

[fiveo]

There's some amount of problem solving and planning involved. But not as challenging as to implement the next distributed storage mechanism. I'm probably closer to done for that world. I'm not a research scientist.

I'm looking at the specific area: financial services (not trading, but more traditional than that: transactions, accounting, etc). I'd love to learn about finances more in conjunction with doing IT related work.

[noodle]

sounds like you've already made up your mind, then