Oracle Coherence Reviews

I utilize Coherence for data solutions in the financial industry. Its primary use case includes plain lookup, indexing, filtering, and aggregation.

Coherence is beneficial due to its multi-indexing to the same object and filtering based on data attributes within the object, followed by aggregation. These features facilitate querying data with multiple keys rather than just a single key. Its real-time data processing capabilities provide insights for business decisions with up-to-date information.

The WebLogic Management is quite cumbersome. The initial setup is complex and time-consuming.

I have had experience with Coherence for close to 15 years.

Stability is very good with Coherence and I would rate it as a nine out of ten. There are no major issues with its stability.

Coherence offers good scalability, which is crucial for enterprise applications. I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.

Customer service with Coherence is rated an eight. Initially, there were delays involved, as they required the deployment details, which couldn't be provided due to company policy.

Positive

Before using Coherence, we had in-house solutions. Coherence was chosen for its capabilities.

The initial setup of Coherence is complex. The WebLogic managed setup took close to two months, involving two people.

Two people were involved in the deployment: one administrator at the middleware level and another person from the application side.

Coherence had an enterprise license before the pricing model changed, resulting in a price shock, as costs increased when transitioning from enterprise to part-license.

The pricing is expensive since it shifted to a part-license model, adding costs. Charges are based on the server, making it expensive, particularly for cloud deployment. We considered moving away from Coherence due to this.

I have started exploring alternatives such as Data Grid and Redis. However, Redis does not support multi-indexing, which is a significant factor for us.

I recommend Coherence, as I don't have any product issues. The main concerns are high pricing and a complex initial setup. 

Overall, I would rate Coherence as an eight out of ten.

We have our own data center with a lot of servers running on the Linux platform.

This platform has issues with stability and performance.

I have been using Oracle Coherence for only a couple of years. In total, I have about 30 years of experience in the Oracle environment. I began with Oracle version 5.0 and have used all of the versions and almost all of the components since that time.

We have had issues related to system instability.

There are some problems and I don't think that this product is scalable. The product is supposed to be scalable but at this point, we are not in a situation where we can test it.

Technical support from Oracle is okay. However, I would not say that they are good.

My main concern with this product is one of stability, so they need to reduce the number of issues and bugs that there are.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

Distributed Storage, Service Bus abstraction of service.

It can handle an extremely high volume of data.

OSB could be tuned to do things like Apigee.

Approximately 10 years.

Intermittent issues with data.

No we did not.

Good.

We’ve never switched, been using Oracle suite for long time.

OSB can be tuned a little bit better.

Was purchased by the organization I worked for.

Couchbase and other distributed storage.

• Putting and getting data from cache
• Clearing the cache using a batch job
• Querying the cache using Coherence QL
• Trigger functionality used when putting data to cache

Would be good if the initial setup was easier.

Almost 2 years.

It is Okay. Seven out of 10.

We used Ehcache in a previoius project and switched to Coherence. Ehcache should be installed in each JVM but Oracle Coherence is a central place, provides response from cache. Space consumption is much less.

Initial setup is bit complex in WebLogic 12c when compared to WebLogic 10g. Performance is very good in Coherence.

Coherence uses key value pair logic to put data to cache and fetch. If you use immutable object in the cache is it very fast, it takes a nanosecond to put it. It uses PortableObject instead of serialization. PortableObject is lightweight compared to implementing serialization.

• Portable object format (POF serialization) that allows objects to be serialized/deserialized between Java and .NET.
• Cache dashboard monitoring that provides reporting at the summary and detail level, such as cache hits and cache object count.

The project involved Java back end and Microsoft .NET front end. The product Portable Object Format (POF) allows the two platforms to exchange data seamlessly.

Data transfer performance over geographical locations. Oracle database has better performance compared to Coherence when accessed from different regions.

Two years.

No, as long as we ensure we have 4x memory capacity than the objects that we want to keep in the cache.

No, the product supports clustering for different nodes (data, extend).

I didn't work with the technical support.

I used .NET in-memory cache and this has a single process limitation, hence each node had to keep its own data. Oracle Coherence excels as it is a distributed cache.

For development work, I usually run Coherence on the development server which has more memory capacity.

Based on my understanding, the license is quite expensive.

No, I didn't, as Coherence was the strategic cache product to use.

It is very important to understand the cache size requirement. Do read the cache size calculation from the documentation to ensure you have enough memory/storage for your data.

• Distributed caching
• Aggregation
• Near caching and expiring policy configuration
• Master nodes and dynamic scaling

This product helped our organization to focus on implementing business logic without worrying about scalability on user loads of huge data queries. Application latency improved drastically with the ability to scale with load.

Better support for complex aggregation and atomicity of data. Configuration and nomenclature require more simplicity to understand for new developers.

Four years.

Mostly, it has been stable other than encountering full GC cycles occasionally.

No.

FIve out of 10.

We did not have a previous solution.

We chose this product, because it was one of the most popular distributed caching in memory cache, which supports capabilities like Cassandra and MongoDB.

It was complex and hard to understand the hidden capabilities. Documentation requires more crispy detail rather than lengthy.

You can evaluate Hazelcast, which looks promising.

In-memory data grid and distributed caching.

It was suited for stock exchange marketing software, improved performance.

Stability.

About 3 years.

Yes, there is a big problem in Coherence cluster. For example, a master, because of connection issues, does not announce its mastery to a slave; slave becomes a master, then two masters appears in cluster, and the whole cluster dies.

No.

Two out of 10. They always look at you innocently and say everything is fine. Only when you send all the core dumps etc. do they start to look into the problem, and it takes from two months to half a year to fix problems.

Yes, I used to use Redis, Aerospike, Cassandra, etc. Why coherence? It was a company decision.

Setup is easy.

Product is too expensive and support is poor. There are better products.

Nope, it was a company decision to use Coherence, and I did not have influence on that decision.

Invest in your network if you use Coherence cluster. Serious!

Near cache and the ability to implement various strategies, like write-behind and read-through cache.

Basically reducing response times to extremely small latencies in their apps.

The Java interface for loading data through the cache from the database was pretty basic. Also, the process of packaging all dependencies to do were rudimentary.

I started using Oracle Coherence in 2008. I have been using the most recent version for six month with two clients (in the banking and cosmetic industries).

None.

None, but there is a considerable important challenge with record versioning and serialization that needs upfront care decisioning.

We just had an issue running Coherence over Solaris containers. Nothing that actually prevented it to run, but the support was standard support quality from Oracle.

Not before, but after Coherence, we had the chance to work for years with Hazelcast. It's an open source and a cheaper competitor.

Very easy. The XML config files were clear how to configure.

Price is very high - as for any Oracle product.

None. I work as a Oracle partner, so there is no way to consider other options.

Do good decisions on serialization and versioning of objects and don't rely on it as the sole source of data, no matter how much energy output it takes to keep its cluster up and running. Rolling out updates can be challenging if you have to write-behind in place. For example, you need to be able to identify that there is nothing waiting before a full shutdown.

• Event driven architecture
• Portable object format
• Live events
• Active - passive replication
• Cache schemes
• Distributed
• Near scheme
• Eviction policies

The improvement on features of Tangosol Coherence during 2006 through 2009 was limited, but the best feature was the standalone. After 2013, integration with Oracle has added many features which have not been used much, or the industry is not ready for the features. It has become very heavy along with the price for Oracle's integrated product as a fusion middleware.

The product has a big miss for troubleshooting, auditing, and monitoring for new features like live events, live objects, etc.

I have used Oracle Coherence for more than 10 years, from version 3.5 through 12.1.2.1.

No.

No, from a product perspective.

Yes, from a license cost perspective.

A six out of 10, as it depends on your relationship with the vendor.

No.

It is costly compared to competitors in the in-memory caching market.

Look for open source with better support on monitoring, auditing, and cloud support.

The EntryProcessor allows you to leverage all of the hardware running Coherence, so you can have a truly grid computing architecture. The feature basically allows you to send logic to the place where the data resides. Because Coherence distributes data across all of the nodes it is running on, you can deal with a massive volume of transactions with maximum scalability.

We are benefiting from performance, thanks to Extreme Performance and innovative architecture.

More simplified configuration would be helpful. Currently, all of the settings are put together in XML files. If you have a complex configuration, that config file could be more than a couple of thousand lines. This is an entirely manual job, so it is very error prone. And the settings are really sparse, either on multiple XML files or command line parameters. There should be some sort of GUI tool with which the user can easily drag and drop to configure, streamlining the configuration process.

I have used it for eight years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

Initial setup is very complex; specifically, a lot of XML effort is required.

An in-house team implemented it. You need to have some level of experiences to: 1) understand the product, and then 2) make the best use of it. Everything requires a learning curve, but especially with Coherence, that learning curve is quite stiff.

ROI would have been much better if there was no annual recurring support fee of 22%.

We also evaluated Hazelcast and Infinispan. Simply, Coherence is better than those two. Coherence absolutely outperforms others in terms of scalability, reliability, and performance.

You need a person with expertise to ramp up quickly. As I’ve mentioned, there is a stiff learning curve, and it can only be avoided with the right person.