I have tried using ORDBMS with Oracle8i, and burnt my hands. No flexibility at all and there is reasonable flexibility with Oracle9i and so we are not left with any option other than forcing ourselves to go Oracle 9i for all of our environments cuz, already the applications have been designed on ORDBMS features and we are having multiple issues dealing with this ORDBMS objects in distributed environment.

As Jeff suggested test, test and test.... and make decision... Not like our environment Architects make decisions with no DBAs involvement. True! We got to go with it Bad economy right...