Your advice is spot-on, but you have to remember that many times the software being ran was written by someone who has long since moved on. Even if the source c

Your advice is spot-on, but you have to remember that many times the software being ran was written by someone who has long since moved on. Even if the source code is readily available, no one may be around to handle to porting it to another RDBMS. Admittedly, this is where much maligned dependency injection frameworks can be useful. I have "upgraded" a large number of old Java software packages by simply placing a newer version of the library's jar on the classpath.