I just wanted to add a few comments to this thread...this rambles, but
bear with me....
 
I have client (major to me, as they provide 80% of my current consulting
income) who has
been an HP3000 shop for > 15 years.  The new VP MIS has hired a large
system integrator
to model the business and re engineer the company using CLIENT SERVER.
 The decision has
already been made to use ORACLE as the "Relational DB" .  What concerns
me most
is that the directive has also come from the Board Of Directors
Technology Advisor Member
(Gee, what a title) that the board does not care what solution is chosen
as long as it
will run Microsoft NT. When I bring up topics like data integrity, system
resiliency, etc, the answer
is in two flavors.  First, "do not be a nay-sayer, its already decided"
and "all server platforms are
created equal".
 
How ignorant!
 
The existing development staff and my efforts as a consultant are
currently being used to keep the "old legacy HP"
systems running while the master re engineering project proceeds.  Thats
OK.  Learning Oracle
will help all of us be more marketable as consultants in the future.
 
I have encouraged the on site folks not to throw away their MPE/iX
manuals yet.
 
 
Yes, the re engineering will be beneficial,
 
Yes , we will learn some neat stuff running the big O.
 
 
However, I believe that the database will become filled with something
besides integrity,
We will see a future increase in demand for a solid relational server.
Furthermore, my crystal ball says that, after the client sees a 40%
reduction in profitability
due to bad data, high cost of purchasing and maintaining the big O, and
the
higher than anticipated cost of maintaining 200 high end PC's
(133mhz Pentium with 2+GB disk and 32MB memory each)
and significantly larger than ever seen cost of bringing in super tech's
who know how to tame the
big O when it is sick,
 
For all these reasons, I believe the HP 3000 will become the back end
server for the C/S applications,
and "BATCH" will continue to run in the background for end of month,
reconciliation, and corporate
high level reporting.
 
Enough of my rambling.
 
One question.  Do others of you who are in the consulting business find
many of your HP clients
following so blindly down this same path?