I am an Oracle DBA and Oracle Financials DBA.

In my opinion the jobs differ quite alot. On the one hand being an Oracle DBA can become quite boring and sameish, you almost have to look for work if you are in a permanent job. Consultancy work is different, you come up against something new everyday.

Oracle Financials gives you work ! There is always something going wrong, whether you have installed it properly or not. Yes, there is alot of patching to be done, but this can be scripted to run itself. I once spent a whole summer applying patches ! The money is the reward if u like. I was getting alot of sterling a day for applying patches, that summer (3 years ago). You wouldn't get anything near what I was getting, doing straight Oracle DBA work, unless specialised in tuning, etc, where you would probably get alot more.

The answer to almost any Oracle Financials technical question can be found on metalink. Metalink will become your best friend. You may have to try several searches, but it nearly always comes up trumps. don't bother phoning Oracle as most of the people on the support desk won't have clue what you are talking about (not all) and all they do is search metalink anyway, bugs and tars not included

If you want to get into Financials jump in at the deep end and then start metalinking. NT would be the way to go. Unix is the environment most 11i environments are being run on, with NT coming second.

It's not that much of a pain in the a*s, it's just different...and after all, aren't we all in this for the money anyway ?