SO much of the stuff they used was version specific... heck even patch level specific. They even relied on BUGS to process faster for somethings. All that went away when they went from Oracle 8 -> 9 they started using and application server for those things.

We went from having to recode all of the direct connects to query specs AND application code.... How was that better?

More Flexible, More Headaches, More machines, more network... yeah.

But you guys also have a pretty great handle on your data in any case. Well, your DB Admin isn't a complete ASS and knows what he is doing. We didn't get one of those until after the 8->9 migration.