My first Oracle experience was similar. Back in the 90s, I was tasked with replacing our old mssql6.5 generic custom built rack log server with something strong

My first Oracle experience was similar. Back in the 90s, I was tasked with replacing our old mssql6.5 generic custom built rack log server with something stronger as the product was successful and we had money. Oracle put me in touch with their eval solutions people who took all my info on number of users, transactions, size, etc and came back with an estimate of a $2M Sun+Oracle box. I told them that the current solution ran on like $10k of licenses and hardware and they revised the spec down to $250k. They were totally clueless but projected absolute competence.