Oracle Database as a Service Reviews

The stability and the format and the speed of the database are very good. 

Some of the technical features could be improved. They have a problem with some of the object types. I think this is one of the issues which is needed to be improved. If they could implement a managing tool that is better than the one they have now, that would be an improvement.

The solution is very stable.

Scalability is very easy. If you want to, you can have it scale onto two or three servers, racks, or whatever you want. It's easy.

Technical support is not bad. It's not like Microsoft support. With Microsoft support, you can search for answers online and you will find a lot of articles that help with problem-solving. With Oracle, if you open a ticket for technical assistance Oracle's very good and they will help you.

The initial setup is straightforward. Even if you're not technical, it's possible to set it up.

I didn't look at any other solutions.

I use some other databases, like Microsoft and MySQL, but they don't have the same performance as Oracle.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten.

The primary use is the leverage DBaaS (Database as a Service) using the Oracle Cloud solution without having to build the database a step at a time.  Getting a pre-built Oracle database can be beneficial for testing for functionality, new development, but mostly the ability to quickly build different sizes of Oracle systems without a large effort.  The ability to resize things is also an advantage over other cloud solutions.  There is also an Autonomous Database.

I think some of the biggest benefits is if there's a consolidation potential, or putting things up in the cloud where I can consolidate many databases into one. Also a location potential is helpful; if I have customers in Germany and China and in the U.S. but my IT is located in Chicago, I could go to the Oracle Cloud and now maybe I can put replicas using Oracle's multi-tenant database. The cloud makes this a lot easier to actually do a clone of a pluggable database, but I could just take that pluggable database and clone it to China. I can clone it to Germany and then I could have one here in the United States. The data is closer to the person. There's also EU privacy laws that I have to keep and it makes it a lot easier to secure things in one location as well. Careful though, some laws require you to take responsibility for what you put in the cloud.  We also benchmarked Oracle ADW vs. AWS Redshift & Oracle was much faster.

Being able to go to go to the website: cloud.oracle.com/tryit and get $300+ in free trial credits is a great way to explore the technology (you can also go to cloud.oracle.com/database to just try database as a service (DBaaS). The cloud is something accelerates efforts to interface with Big Data and IOT, but it takes an educated buyer to implement the right pieces at the right time. The cloud gives people the ability to leverage big data from non-Oracle sources including Hadoop and Hive, quickly deploy a development test or simple application, and to leverage the interfaces to other companies and to use mobile apps. I think the downside is it's causing people pain as it compresses how fast they need to learn about it and effectively move the parts of their system that are better suited in the cloud. I think that's the biggest issue right now. Some of the features that are out there for database as a service on the cloud, if you want to have an encrypted backup in the cloud or a test database, it's nice to have a backup that's offsite or a system where you can test new features. Are you going to put your backup in a lock-box at the local bank or are you going to put it on some other cloud? With Oracle, you can send it with RMAN encrypted backup straight to the Oracle Cloud and it's there when you need it. If you had to fail-over for some reason when you use Oracle Cloud, and you have an Exadata in-house, Oracle has an Exadata in the cloud that you could fail right over to (this allows either a CAPEX or OPEX financial event). Maybe you have some big data where you don't have enough servers and you know exactly what you want hardware wise, well, you're familiar with that Exadata performance so you know exactly what you're going to get in the cloud since the hardware is similar to what you have on-site.

Features that people want the most are already there. One of them is Oracle In-Memory which allows you to put things in a columnar data store in memory with Oracle's 12c (12.1.0.2+). You could have an in-memory database. You could have columnar data, which is compressed and in-memory (in the in-memory column store) or if you're doing transactional data, it's in the buffer cache (memory) so it's very fast to do that transactions. It's a different memory area altogether. When I look at the cloud, you'll need In-Memory more, because you're going to be dealing with larger volumes of data. The second feature that helps is multi-tenancy; Oracle already has this as of 12c Release 1. It is the ability to clone and move things around and maybe do an exchange partition (PDB - Pluggable Database) with one of your vendors or one of your customers out there (given security needs are met). Non-PDBs (or not using multi-tenancy is being deprecated).  Leveraging and testing new features of 12.2 is also beneficial.  Oracle 18c will be beneficial with Snapshot Carousel, PDB switchover,  In-Memory External Tables and Polymorphic Tables.

I think the way that Oracle and other vendors can move people quicker to the cloud is by educating people on the capabilities of the cloud and some of the benefits of the cloud. I think as customers and vendors out there and partners of Oracle look at providing solutions for the cloud, I think people will be more likely to go there, but what I think right now is the biggest hesitancy is there are a lot of other cloud providers don't have any of the features Oracle has. Oracle must let people know that if you have on-site Exadata, now you can have Exadata in the cloud. Easy to move. You've got a lot of data you want to archive? You can move it to a slower, larger server or a faster, smaller server depending on what you want to do. Just the capabilities that they have in-house or in the cloud. Some cost more than others, so effective planning is one big key to success. The cloud is gaining momentum, but the key to success is evaluating it fully and using appropriately.

No.

I did an estimate of all the servers that are out there and Google is obviously very large. Amazon Web Services is very large but if you take Oracle's cloud, which is over 1 exabyte now and then you take the compression that you can do with Oracle, it's actually, probably the largest cloud that's out there right now (many Exabytes). From a scalability standpoint, as big as the world is, as big as you can think, that's how large you can scale your applications.

Oracle's technical support has almost every answer just by searching their support system. I always find what I'm looking for and more.

I think everybody knows that they need to move from on-premise to the cloud. They know the cloud is what's coming next. They know it's way to quickly interface with social media with Big Data very quickly. I think their hesitancy is: where does it fit? Give us the opportunity to do a hybrid cloud so that our staff can be up to date on exactly how this works and I think then they'll move there faster. There are other clouds with MANY hidden costs.  Please hire an expert to consult when evaluating hidden costs on the cloud.  Viscosity North America pays particular attention to these hidden costs.  Viscosity also has an Oracle vs. AWS whitepaper on our website.

I thought it was very easy to setup database as a service (within hours - the second one will take minutes) for testing new features and familiarizing yourself with the flow of things.

We brought a customer that was not in the cloud, all on premise and we put their EBS finances into the Oracle cloud and all their manufacturing was still on site. They were multi-currency. They were multi-country. Initially there was a lot of education that needed to happen. The more education you put forth at the beginning edge of that project, the more likely you're going to be successful in the middle of that project, but cloud projects tend to be shorter in duration and then when you get to the end of that, there's a lot of questions on things that people could do that they couldn't do before they got to the cloud. The 'what ifs' we'll say. What if I could extend my data to all these data sources with big data? Well, they never asked that before because they never could do it before. Now that they're in the cloud, their whole world opens up to what the capabilities are for their company itself. Some of those discussions are interesting after the fact.

It really depends how this is measured.

There are different prices for different architectures - plan wisely and ensure that you look at all the pluses/minuses of each provider!

Some of the criteria for when you're evaluating a cloud, to me, number one is cost, but after that it's SLA (Service Level Agreement - from the cloud provider). Is my data going to be there? Consider a credit card company. They have seven seconds until they're paying some other company because they didn't do the transaction fast enough. Usually it takes them one second to approve your transaction so time and speed is probably the most important thing.

What are some of the criteria people should be looking at? First of all is SLA. Will it be up? The second isL is it going to be on hardware and software that I'm used to? I have a tech staff of 100 people, are they going to be able to do their job when that data's in the cloud? Just being familiar with things. Can it scale? Is it large enough?

Read my 12cR2 book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Oracle-...

How would Oracle rate on a scale of 1 to 10 with cloud solution? I think it depends absolutely on which Oracle cloud solution it is. Some are 10 and some are lower. It depends which architecture you evaluate.

Many people are looking at it now. The main key is get educated. Understand what's out there. I did three sessions at Oracle OpenWorld and Java World in 2017, all of them have cloud. I will do many at Collaborate earlier this year (April 2018) and all of them will have cloud. Why? Because I know it's important and where many things are going to some degree. Whether people are using the 12c database, 18c database, that's one of my talks, I know it's important to be ready for the cloud (the 11g database is also available on the cloud). How you would migrate each database and what multi-tenant does to assist you in that process is an important feature of Oracle. I also have regular sessions on the Internet of Things (IOT) which talks about all these devices that are going to be integrated with your database and big data and obviously cloud plays perfectly to that one.

The primary use case is transaction services of the bank. The performance is amazing. It is very good for the all-flash disk.

• More SLAs for the clients; better performance in our transactions for clients.
• Improves client satisfaction by decreasing their problems.

• The performance
• The opportunity for recovery

I would like to see a better dashboard for the storage. It need to be more complete overall. At the moment, it is basic. 

The stability is very good. There have been no problems.

The scalability is good. There have been no problems.

We have had no issues contacting technical support. We use the Chilean and US support offices, and they respond quickly.

We had Hitachi storage, but the performance and the support were very bad.

The initial setup was easy.

We looked at Dell storage, but we chose Oracle due to its performance, security, and scalability.

I would recommend the solution. It is quite complete and very good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Recommendations
• Performance
• Stability.

Not only does it provide a mature, reliable solution for DR. It also helps if application owners need to look into data which is a couple of hours old, using Flashback Database on the standby database.

Data Guard, because it’s the best solution for Disaster Recovery.

The licensing is a nightmare. Tons of options which need to be licensed individually, and no real offering for VMware or other Hypervisors.

And my favorite option – Multitenant – should be available for some pluggable databases in all editions without any fee.

No stability issues at all.

RAC is not a real scalability solution, so instead of scaling out I prefer to scale up.

Very poor.

I have always used Oracle Database.

Back in the early 90s, set up was difficult. But now, it’s straightforward using the graphical interfaces. But there is indeed room for improvement. An 8GB download for software is far too big. Nowadays it should be possible to simply use RPM packages on Linux/Unix.

There should be a standard way to license the database in a virtual environment (e.g. VMware) and there should be a low-end version (like Standard Edition One) again.

Before starting to look for the high-end solution (Enterprise Edition) you should consider using Standard Edition Two. There is a great chance that it will be sufficient, and gaps can be filled with third-party products like Dbvisit Standby for Distaster Recovery.

Many databases can be consolidated without any change to the application.

The Oracle Multitenant feature of 12c is awesome. This feature enables us to consolidate disparate databases under one container database and eases manageability of the databases. It also allows us to scale.

Some bugs could be fixed. There have been some internal software bugs, just like any other newly released software. These bugs gets fixed by patch updates from Oracle on regular basis.

No stability issues.

No scalability issues.

Excellent.

The planning phase was bit complex regarding what to consolidate, but implementation was straightforward.

Check Oracle support.

I rate it a 10 out of 10, due to the scalability, flexibility, and cloud oriented approach.

Plan well and it should be fine.

• Resource elasticity
• Rapid provisioning
• Automated centralized management of all DBs
• Measured services, etc.

• Technically, apart from the cost reduction, it reduces the administration overheads.
• Scale-up and scale-down resources, as per the demand to ensure the major business, do not impact performance issues.

• Reduce the licensing cost further.
• Stronger security

Over one year now.

Challenges faced when migrating the on-premise database to cloud, especially VLDBs.

Mostly with the internet availability and speed. Nothing really with the stability of the DBaaS.

Not anything we have come across.

Satisfactory.

Satisfactory.

Most of the DEV/UAT/TEST were on-premises, which moved to the cloud with consolidation.

There were technical challenges configuring the connectivity, moving the data, etc.

Installation was through a vendor.

Reduced the number of traditional storage/server architecture. More productivity and quick provisioning of the database helped moving the application to production quickly.

Oracle licensing is expensive compared to other competitors, such as AWS and MS Azure.

Yes. AWS and MS Azure.

Any DEV/UAT/TEST environments are really candidates to go for cloud and ensure you fully utilize the flexibility of cloud technologies.

It provides the ability to run from a simple schema base to a real application database, including the option to run it on the Oracle public cloud. In cases where the customer has an issue with data locality or privacy, the option to seamlessly switch to a Oracle public cloud machine in the customer's own DC makes this the most flexible cloud solution.

The automatic inclusion of all database options in Enterprise Edition (EE), Extreme Performance and Exadata cloud service make this product very attractive.

Previously, when proposing cloud solutions for Oracle database to enterprise clients the lack of a viable high availability solution was often cost prohibitive. Oracle offers this as a standard option. With Active Dataguard freely available for Extreme Performance, there is no enterprise cloud service catering to the Oracle database that can match this offering

Currently, there is no simple method to modify the orchestrations on which the compute hosts are based. Hence, unlike the IaaS Oracle services, in cases where there is a need to make certain changes to the service, such as adding an IP network or a GRE tunnel, it requires specialized skills from the backend. However, we expect with the rapid pace of innovation that the feature to modify advanced aspects might be added on the fly in later versions.

We have been experimenting with the solution for just over a year now and we have clients that are going live on the system as I write this.

We saw some minor hiccups to do with networking and connectivity. We also were utilizing the Exadata database cloud service for one client and faced some issues with the cloud tooling. One minor problem was if we created a database of a particular name in capitals, deleted the database, and then tried to recreate the same database but with small letters, the cloud tooling would not allow this. We raised the issue to Oracle, who provided a fix and will incorporate this in the next version of the Exadata cloud tooling.

On the whole, the system was very stable. We only faced one unexplained hiccup, when a server was rebooted and we were not able to track down the root cause.

We did not face any issues with scalability. We are using Oracle OTD for high-availability scale out, which was initially active-passive but later an active-active solution was provided.

We have had very responsive customer support. On several occasions, the Oracle Cloud A-Team directly came on the call with us to help resolve issues.

The technical team from the vendor side was quite knowledgeable and we were able to resolve some network routing issues quite quickly.

We have used other cloud providers. However, they did not have a true high-availability cloud solution. The second issue we found is that I/O bandwidth was comparatively variable on the other cloud providers and we could not scale easily beyond a few terabytes without facing I/O bottlenecks.

Because we had taken training on the platform, it was very familiar for us. However, it would not be so easy for someone implementing this from scratch. We would recommend going with an experienced managed service provider.The platform provides surprising flexibility for something that is billed as platform as a service.

We are ourselves a cloud service provider team that implemented for several customers.

This varies across our customers but they all are seeing benefits over their erstwhile in-house solutions.

The cloud option provides a lot of benefits for Oracle shops, as it reduces the upfront costs and converts the licensing costs to a running cost.

We have utilized other cloud and hosted platforms such as Azure, Macquarie Telecom, Verizon, Xerox, etc. However, this option was superior for Oracle Database hosting.

This provides an enterprise-class cloud solution that can scale to terabyte-sized databases in the cloud without having to compromise.

Easiness, that's number one for me because I use the cloud for testing purposes. When I present about database things because I do a lot of presentations and I like to test on the cloud. This cloud is everywhere so when I'm presenting here in US, I have the same cloud available that I have in Finland where I prepared my presentation. It's very easy and very convenient. I use Oracle Databases.

What is the best place for an Oracle database if it's not the Oracle Cloud? If I take any of the other clouds that wouldn't be the same. Of course the best is the Oracle's original cloud.

I think most of the customers are hoping for having 24/7 kind of support for if anything happens during the night, they will fix it without you knowing it. Of course there will be an extra cost for the customer but it shouldn't be too much. That's what I think most of the customers will be happy with. You don't have to have your own operators to look after your operation system and the databases and so on and Oracle would look after all that. They have those services but I think they're a bit expensive at the moment.

I think scalability is the top thing here because you are just able to scale up and down whenever you feel like it. You can't do it on premises.

Nobody is ever happy with support with any vendor so if I would say I would give them the score five, everybody would be laughing. There is no support that is 100% good. Usually it's been after it's been down or something like that. If I find a back or an error or something like that, I might need to contact somebody to fix it but I've had very good support by friends who work for Oracle. Not the official channels has been very efficient so all my problems have been solved.

Usually it's a long process so it starts when you realize that the hardware you have is going to be obsolete and you start your process there. You know one year from now I have to do something, I have to buy new hardware, I have to do something. That's usually where the process starts and then you start thinking should I buy a new hardware or should I go to the cloud.

It's the same as you're changing from one machine to another machine, it's just the same. You're just changing from one machine to a cloud. We did that for one of our customers and it was very, very easy and simple.

Reliability I will say that's the most important thing and what I learnt today from the keynote was that people are afraid about security and especially about the vendor security. I think that's something that you should really look at when you are choosing your vendor. How are they taking care of your security? Because you have all your valuable data in that cloud, you don't want anybody to go and mess with it.

Rating: I'm a Finn, I never give ten for anything. I would say seven or eight which is very good for me. There's a lot to improve yet but I think it's getting pretty good already. Let's say eight, I'm in a good mood today.

I would start with a test database. I would go with them to cloud first to get the experience because most of the people are afraid of the cloud. They don't know what to expect and how they juggle things and so on because they're used to see the computer, touch them and know exactly what is where and what kind of block you have in your computer and so on. So it's very scary to let somebody else take care of that things. The first step would probably be give your test databases to the cloud and see how it works and realize that actually now you have time for the real job instead of doing constant upgrades and so on. I would start with the test database to get experience and the touching feeling of how it is.

So from the database perspective, we usually are talking about three important things. So the obvious ones are the multitenancy in the pluggable databases. The second category, I would call it performance, making sure that we are getting the right value from the databases in terms of data access. And the third one is obviously the security. So, we are more interested in implementing solutions that, we are actually excited to see Oracle come in with release two with all the issues we have, from 11g and on. So, 12.1 is there, but we want to see what's coming up in 12c at release two, and we are really excited about multitenancy. The whole security aspect, and then the performance as such.

So from the cloud perspective, I think there are too many vendors out there. One of the things we are excited from the Oracle perspective is their ability to take us off of our backups, the database backup. Using that, they can take us to the cloud and we want to try that out, mostly on their test end, as of now. And once we see how the ROI is, and what kind of a performance we are getting and then also check on how the security is, then we might probably consider going a little bit deeper into low-level production applications, all the way into the business applications.

So right now we are evaluating their trial period with Oracle on migrating in their databases, and we are also excited to use some of their backup and recovery solutions, which basically, you take your database and you run your backups, right now it is running on your local disk, but then we are configuring that to go into the cloud. So one of the cool features we are using from Oracle is the RMAN. It takes a second set of channels, and just take it as a destination and that goes into the cloud. So we can restore it at the same time from either of the options, on-prem or from the cloud. So we are excited to see how that works, because that is something that Oracle has recently come up with.

So we want to see, obviously, besides Oracle databases, what other databases can be provisioned and integrated in the cloud. So if I have to have an application running off of a non-Oracle database, and I have an application and the database running in cloud, which is an Oracle, I want to see if I can integrate them through what kind of a web service, how can I transfer the data? How do I move my processes without having to come back into my on prem and then go back into the secondary cloud? So those are some of the integration points I'm looking at.

And the second important thing I'm looking at is, the overall governance. How Oracle can provide their cloud control and give use the ability to manage the on prem and the off prem cloud services, combined in a single view.

So obviously we did an ROI analysis and a TCU. So, we have seen that the cost is definitely a factor. And security is more important, so that's why we did not press the button on the production yet. So we are piloting with the non-prod to see what kind of security we're going to get, what kind of threats are we going to be exposed to. And once we are satisfied, once we get our sign-off from the management, we might probably pull the trigger. But we are in the evaluation period.

Onboarding: so the Database Cloud, the way we have seen is, so you have a cloud control and you go in and, based on your subscription, you actually get the environment. So once you get the environment, you generate the security keys to establish the network connectivity between the on prem to the public and once we have the provision done, then you can actually encrypt the data on the source side, and move them into the cloud through their cloud control utility. So that's how we migrate them. Now, we haven't done a lot of the big databases yet. So we are piloting on the small ones. So, so far, the pilot ones look good which are close to about 300 to 400 GB databases. But we want to see how that goes with couple of terabytes of databases.

Scalability is number one. Data transfer is number two. And security actually tops, on top of that. And the ability to move the workloads between on-prem and off-prem. So that's one of the big things you are looking at, and if we don't like things, and if you want to push back, and we want to come back to our on-prem, what options do we have? So, can we migrate easily from a public cloud to a private cloud and private cloud to an on-prem cloud, and vice-versa. So, having that ability is a big thing, because we don't want to invest in something where we go to the cloud but we don't know how to come back. So we don't want it to be a one-way street, we want to choose a product that can give us an opportunity to not only go into the cloud, but also in a worst-case scenario, come back out.

So initially we started with Amazon. We tested a little bit, but the security was a big thing for us and the way they handle security is a little different I don't necessarily say it is wrong or bad, it's just that I was not very comfortable having the keys being shared versus in Oracle, the security keys are owned by the customer which is us, as opposed to with the vendor, and that was a prime difference for us. And second thing was, Amazon cloud is more on the infrastructure provisioning and metered. They don't give a database as a service. They do have some options, but being an Oracle customer, we know what Oracle can provide, which is totally a value-add kind of a service, with a lot of different shaders, compared to the others like Amazon or Rackspace or a hundred different partners. But I think it's because we are very close with Oracle, we can see how they can give us those value add services.

So the Database Cloud on Oracle right now, I think it's there, but there is some room to grow. So I wouldn't give them 10 yet. I would hold on to that. Probably eight would be a better option. But I want to see the growth in terms of, not only on the vertical side, I want to see the horizontal growth, in terms of how they can leverage, as I said earlier, integrating with other systems. So, if they can grow both horizontally and vertically, then probably I can give them a 10. But at this time, they are not there yet.

So I would say, anybody who wants to get into the cloud, evaluate your options. Check out your dev and test environments first. Check out your backup as a service, because it's very easy. You just have to set your targets and push your database backups. So try with those two first, and see the difference, and compare that with your other vendors. And see what kind of a response latency you're getting from the cloud. And make the call. I mean, that's what I did, and it was clear.

We have found all of the features of this solution to be valuable to our organization.

The solution uses a large amount of CPU space, which could be improved. 

We would also like to see a reduction in the licensing costs for using this solution, as it is quite costly.

We have been working with this solution for two years.

We have found the solution to be stable during our time using it.

We believe the product to be scalable.

The initial setup was okay, it took around two hours to complete.

We implemented the solution using our in-house team.