Don't be ashamed to be PERL PROUD brother dep! I think people trust you more when you stick to what YOU are truly passionate about.

Depending upon the Oracle version you might buy (hopefully 8i v8.1.7 or later I suggest) it comes with the Oracle Express Engine (I'm told, it's a kind of "OLAP cube engine" for their OFA (Oracle Financial Analyzer) tool, which you still have to buy separately (of course, that's Oracle for ya!). Also Oracle 8i Discoverer has tools to create management reports.

PL/SQL scripts or stored procedures are like going back to "dBASE for DOS" to me. They work but aren't very elegant or interesting.

I think you can confidently put your Monk's hood down and hold your head up high! Your management can more easily hire another Perl programmer than find an OLAP expert for whatever flavor be it Cognos, BusinessObjects, Hyperion, or AlphaBlox. Unfortunately for us Perl programmers, probably cheaper too!

I agree with another Monk who commented (sorry no reference) that nothing is faster than MySQL for very large databases. The DBI connection to MySQL isn't perfect, but damn near and better than any other (my opinion, no slight intended to other module authors). It doesn't have views, but you can "simulate" them with temporary tables cause it's so damn fast.