Oracle Coherence Reviews

• 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.

• Memory grid
• Multicast support

It helped us to cache the data in memory and improved performance by 10x.

The cross-site or cross-data center replication seems slow. This can be improved.

We have been using this solution for four years.

We have a stability issue once a year on the average. Most of the time, the cause is a network issue. When a few servers get out of the cluster, we lose data.

There have not really been any scalability issues.

Technical support is OK, but it is not really great.

The installation was pretty easy.

You can go ahead with this product blindly if you are looking for a memory grid kind of solution. The license is there for sure.

In order, the most valuable features are:

1. Flexible topology
2. Data affinity
3. Configurability
4. POF (optimized) serialization
5. Support of C++ & Java

We are system integrators. We used Coherence in building a transaction processing system for a client. Introducing a data grid, we moved from a vertically scalable solution to full scalability. The data grid helped a lot to reach the goal of scaling the system in a virtualized environment.

Monitoring and control of the grid was only via JMX interface. Logging was distributed, thus hard to collect and put in order to be able to investigate the issues, eventually. Today's Coherence version has a new logging system and a web-based UI.

I have been using it for 1,5 years.

No stability issues: A node can fail, but the topology can be designed to be fault-tolerant.

Scalability is safe. The data is distributed/replicated. Adding/removing a node only has the cost of re-distributing the partitions of the data across the network.

N.A.

We did not previously use a different solution.

It is very easy to set up a basic topology, but hard to configure and tune to make it really work.

N.A. The client paid a license for the full Oracle stack of products.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options. The client used the full Oracle stack in their architecture.

Before you can master Coherence, you must study how a data grid works. So, start learning about common data grid patterns. The next step is Coherence documentation, which is clear, but huge.

We use Coherence to keep aware of critical data. We have millions of customers whose data is in Coherence. Previously, when we stored customer data in the database, it took about seven minutes just to locate one customer profile. About 90% of customer data is static. Since we implemented Coherence, this data is in memory all the time; so the results are found in milliseconds instead of five seconds. Our response time for customers calling us over our portal has reduced drastically. We are now able to provide service to our customers much faster. This is amazing, especially for our customers.

It has really transformed the speed that we can respond to customers. Now I don't need to worry about increasing my customer base. I used to wonder how I was really going to provide service to over five million customers. Generally, as the number of customers goes up, the biggest challenge is to provide the same kind of response time. Now I don't need to worry about it. I can just keep growing our customer base, but our response time tends to remain the same.

Reloading really takes a lot of time.

We are already using it for a couple of years.

It is a stable product. We don't really have any issues. The only thing that we really need to think about is when we need to reload the whole thing, especially if we need to do some patching or maintenance. That really takes about 24 hours. That's the downside. It’s something that we are now living with. So we really take that hit on that. Generally, that's why we really plan our maintenance.

I think now I really need that more in a hardware way; but I would really not find that as a challenge anymore. We are actually able to do it more comfortably because now, whether I'm scaling up or scaling down, it's very transparent.

I can't really live without Oracle technical support. There are times when we have so many challenges and into so much trouble and so many issues. They are very helpful. Without them, I would say we can't even function; so they are really good. We have platinum support, and we are able to get their support. Sometimes there are escalations which we need to go through to get the right SLA engaged. But I think we are really getting critical support.

We did not have a different solution before. We were looking for this solution. The response time is the key. It was really touching. When we really started with five million customers, the response time was four seconds. The customer base was increasing, and that became five seconds; and then six seconds. It just kept going up. So we thought we needed to come up with some solution for reducing the response time.

We were looking for a cost-effective solution. Nowadays, any business must keep the operating cost in mind. Why do we want to go for the cloud? Because we are spending so much on the hardware. I really want to make sure my investment in hardware brings a good cost-effective return on the investment.

I keep everything in mind. Of course, I also look for the security and scalability.

The initial setup was neither complex nor really easy. It was somewhere in the middle. I didn't really involve myself in that directly. I am one of the heads of the site. I just fed them the data. It was pretty much implemented by mid-level people; so I don’t really know what the challenges were.

I think this is the only solution we considered. Whenever we really look for a product, first we look whether Oracle has something appropriate. I have been using Oracle for a number of years. I think they always have a solution. They started with the database. Now they have the middleware and the hardware. They have the complete application solutions. You name it and they have it.

Coherence had all the features and benefits we needed.

Look into Coherence’s features. Get a demo first and evaluate whether you can really make use of this product.

Oracle Coherence enables our customers to pay their bills and view their usage and all other kinds of information. We use Oracle’s Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) for managing all billing data. Our business customers use it to manage hundreds of accounts.

Mobile devices need to load faster. Coherence lets us retrieve data from the CC&B and the database, build a full user profile, and store this information in the session in Coherence. With this, you do not need the back-end system anymore. After the first login, the site loads faster because it does not need to go to the back end.

We have about 10 servers so that all 10 servers are used for load balancing. If I pay the bill, this information gets passed from one server to the next with Oracle synchronizing the data between servers. I can perform different actions on the same account. That information is handled by different servers, but Oracle synchronizes the data.

The product quality is good. It is stable and easy to use; and increasingly flexible when you scale up.

Oracle Coherence improved site performance and the customer experience. Customers don’t want to see that the site is too slow or that there are breaks in transactions. They want faster access, especially for mobile devices. For people with network bandwidth and a data plan, it has to be faster.

It is alright now. It is a heavyweight. It would be good if it could be made more lightweight, and could be more easily installed in a local environment, and made easier to use later on, in the open source.

It's quite stable. Ever since I started using it, for the past year, we only had to restart that product one time.

Coherence was not originally an Oracle product. Oracle bought it and made it more mature. They made it enterprise-wide; and it’s good. They also made it a bit pricier. We were using an EH cache open source, which actually wasn’t performing that well. We had to do a lot of restarting and troubleshooting. But now with Coherence, it's quite stable. Because we are an Oracle vendor, we have a license.

For scalability, it is basically the JVM. If you want to scale up, it is just a matter of adding a JVM. It can scale horizontally, and it can scale vertically. If you want to add 10 servers, just add a JVM. Right now, we have our own 14 instances.

We have a grid for JVM installations, so if we want to use the 10 servers, and other people also want to use them, they are likely to build something. It can be scalable.

Oracle technical support has multiple support levels: with platinum and gold plans. We got the platinum support, because we are at Oracle shop rates. They come and always work with us; and they sold us many of the Oracle products. For any small thing, if we are not getting attention, and we need immediate support, we can invite support people to come in onboard; and they will do it for us.

We did research on all the open source products, and we initially applied the solution with EH cache. That was pretty good. When we wanted to scale higher, to about six million users, it wasn’t going to work. We don’t care about the expense because Oracle is our partner, and more. If you are a small business that cannot afford million-dollar products, you would go for an EH cache. We can afford a million-dollar product, so we are doing that.

Initial setup is not exactly easy. At first, it is a little complicated. Once you do it, and stabilize the solution, it is good. People who are know these kinds of things can do it.

It is very expensive. It might not work well for small business people.

We did research on all the open source products.

To a similar client looking for advice, I’d say that this is a great product, but you need to pay the price for it. If you are willing to pay the price, you will be satisfied with the product quality. It has more than what you need.

At the enterprise level, if you have all your own data center, Oracle, Coherence, and if you are willing to spend that much money, Oracle is great.

But if you are a small business, going with open source, there are a lot of things available. EH cache is the most popular open source thing with its caching mechanism. That worked well for us on a smaller scale. You need to determine whether that’s going to work for you.

There are multiple products out there. The main determining factors are whether you want to have a local or distributed cache; and whether you want to use it in the Cloud or locally. If you are using it in the Cloud, you can explore multiple options. If you’re use Oracle, they are going to advise you. You are going to need to plan out and implement the caching and system customizations.

The most important features to me are its scalability, high availability, and distributed caching mechanism.

We used the distributed caching mechanism to keep the cache up-to-date with the database. Implementation of the Touch processor helped a lot.

They could make the configuration management easier. Failure maintenance could be improved.

We have been using Oracle Coherence for one year.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We received very good technical support.

Before using Oracle Coherence, we tried using Ehcache. We switched because of replication, grid support, and a few other reasons.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation and technical support also helped.

Before we decided to use Oracle Coherence, we tried out Ehcache, but found the Oracle Coherence better suited our product implementation requirements.

Oracle Coherence is a very good product which helps to create internet-scale applications using a high-performance grid.

The most valuable features are ease of use, scalability without too much work, and failover recovery.

We were trying to get better performance of compute tasks previously developed on RDBMS to cache and it has improved the performance by a factor of 4.

I'd like to see:

• More documentation
• Less/easier configuration
• More IDE support or create a spring-boot starter

I have used this product for around six months.

I have not really encountered any stability issues. I was pleased with its fault tolerance.

I have not encountered any scalability issues either.

We have not made use of any technical support as of yet.

We tried several approaches towards our goal of performance improvement. This was the most likely solution and hence was used.

The tutorials helped, but I use NetBeans, so there was a learning curve, but nothing complicated.

The price is high. I believe there should be a cheaper version for only the caching solution.

We have not evaluated other caching products because this an Oracle product and the product/solution was from Oracle too. We tried some streaming alternatives like Spark, etc.

The product is great, simple, and easy to use and integrate. See if your infrastructure supports it; if there are ways to make it work. Do a PoC before deciding.