Partly because the rest of NetAction was mostly a Microsoft .Net environment, Helle tested the then-beta version of SQL Server 2005 against Oracle 10g, both of which had 64-bit versions.

Microsoft treated Helle well, putting NextAction into a special program for extremely large databases that included plenty of support. But within two weeks, the results were clear to Helle. 'SQL Server has made great strides in the past couple of years. But like I told the Microsoft guys, it's hard to match [Oracle's] 15 years of evolution,' he said.

Not only was Oracle Enterprise 10g much more stable, it was also much faster, Helle said. 'We ran about 20 benchmarks. Creating applications was, on average, eight times faster on Oracle. Loading data was about 12 times faster. An updating statement that died after 1.5 days on SQL Server without completing took one hour and 10 minutes to finish on Oracle.'

The weekly customer data mining now takes only one day. That is in part because NextAction uses Oracle Partitioning to run more than 1,100 partitions, one for each customer.

That 30TB database was shrunk to just 5TB after being rewritten -- and it was moved to one Oracle instance from eight. For backup purposes, NextAction is using Oracle's Data Guard, which sets up a mirror with a second, identical Oracle database.