Oracle Database Reviews

We use it internally for some small odds and ends. Two of our biggest clients use this solution. One client has more or less a data warehousing application. Another one has more of a transactional and pseudo accounting application.

I am currently using 12c, but I have also done some work with version 18. This July, we're going to upgrade most of our main databases from version 12 to version 18, which is fairly current. I believe they have version 20 available at this point.

The thing that probably stands out the most about Oracle Database is reliability. I have been working with Oracle Databases for over 25 years, and I have never lost any data due to a machine going down or any events that were not stupid human tricks. I've never lost anybody's data using Oracle. It gets the job done and doesn't fail. 

It does what I want it to do. It has got a lot of features. Anytime I need a feature, I am able to find it in Oracle Database. It has never happened that I found a feature in any other database, but I was not able to find it in Oracle.

There is a lot of room for improvement. It is not meant for dilettantes. It is not meant for people who don't work on it day in and day out. Ease of use is probably the biggest complaint. They're getting somewhat better, but it is not as easy or intuitive as it could be in terms of maintaining and managing the database. The day-to-day maintenance and the ability to easily do things and keep things up to date can be painful.

Their support portal requires a person to become well-trained in how to use it. I'm sure it has lots of features and capabilities but to try and get support is somewhat painful. They are pretty good at handling absolute critical emergencies, but with the exception of absolute critical emergencies, getting problems solved from their support system is difficult and takes a long time. I had to do an update, and it was not straightforward to get the right patch kit. I'm getting to the point now where I somewhat understand how to use their support website, but it is not intuitive.

Probably about 80% of their online documentation is useless. When I have a question about what to do or how to do something, the things that come up on top when I do a search, of course, are Oracle websites. I always skip right past those and go to other websites. There's an old expression from my youth, "I want to know what time it is. I don't want to know how to build the clock." When you go to the Oracle documentation, you have to plow through page after page of stuff to get to anything that looks anything like an example of what it is that you might actually do. There are lots of other people who have filled that gap, and there are also websites where you can easily find the answers to most of your questions.

I have been working with Oracle Databases for over 25 years. The first time I started using Oracle Database was around 1995. It was probably version 3 or 6.

It is one of the robust products from a stability point of view. I have not really found bugs or glitches. However, on a test database, I had an issue the other night where Oracle decided to behave badly when I was trying to do a query. The solution was to get the latest patches and install the latest patches. Everything worked fine after that. I did all of that without contacting Oracle support. I needed to get what I was working on done. So, I had to plow through to find the answers. I had found some people making some oblique references to what the problem might be. I then took a chance on doing the update. I found the patch kit, but it was not easy to find the right patch kit on their website. 

In the data warehousing database or application, we have tens of millions of rows in different tables, and we have no problems there. However, in that particular application, we're not dealing with transaction processing. So, I can't answer the scalability in terms of transaction processing. On the hardware platform that I've put together for the main database of this one customer, I am very pleased with the performance of the data warehousing aspects and being able to query data quickly and do bulk inserts and things of that nature. For data warehousing scalability, I can attest to the fact that it is great, but for transaction processing, I don't have the experience to be able to provide information.

Two of our biggest clients are quasi-governmental in the sense that their business is based on government funding. One has 60 users who use the application day in and day out, and their database is relatively small. The other application has about 20 dedicated internal users, and then there is a web interface. It has around 3,000 to 5,000 users, but typically, there are about 20 concurrent users. 

Their support portal requires a person to become well-trained in how to use it. Getting support is somewhat painful. They are pretty good at handling absolute critical emergencies, but getting other problems solved from their support system is difficult. It takes a long time. I had to do an update, and it was not straightforward to get the right patch kit.

I am the technical resource of last resort for our clients. I work with a number of technical people. When it gets to the point that it wasn't an easy problem to solve, they come to me, and I end up getting all of the tough problems to solve. I like that, and I would rather do that than just working on the same thing day in and day out. I am always trying to solve problems, and that's why I end up having to interface with Oracle support. The ability to solve problems better by using Oracle's support tools would be beneficial for me.

Its initial installation and setup have become better. You can set up something fairly easily these days. If you need to do anything that is not straight out of the box, figuring out how to do it is not easy. If you want to just set up your average everyday database, you can get it up and running with a few mouse clicks.

As a consultant for the last 40 years of my life, the conversation with anyone who wants to use a product would be a lot more in-depth and detailed where I'd be asking, "What is it you want to do? How do you want to do it? Where do you want to go?" It isn't the kind of thing for which I'd say, "Yeah, Oracle's a Swiss army knife, the best thing since sliced bread."

It is one of the more robust products from a stability point of view. There is a bit of a learning curve. From a transaction point of view, if you have the right hardware, Oracle is probably as or more scalable than anybody else. If your application is going to be massively scalable, Oracle is probably your best tool. If you're just going to put together a small application for occasional users, there are easier tools to learn and use. Some of them are even by Oracle.

I would rate Oracle Database an eight out of ten. It is a great product.

Because I worked with various organizations, most of the time we used it for government and other centers, such as managing transport systems.

It performs quite well.

In general, Oracle is quite good. It's a large database that houses many applications.

In terms of backup Basically, I believe that will depend, particularly on backup and those components, on the knowledge that you have. However, if you have the proper knowledge, it should not be a problem for you. The database does not cause problems when properly configured and best practices of database administration are followed.

When compared to others such as Postgres, Oracle is a very good database.

Oracle Database is easy to use.

The only issue was the same as with the EDS licenses. When you try to tell customers that you can critically patch their system, they always complain about the cost. In terms of pricing, I believe Oracle should be aware of this fact. I'm not sure if it's because it's only happening here in Africa, but some of the guys I spoke with prefer to patch all the time. When you ask people in this town, "Look guys, can you critically patch the system?" they will tell you it's too expensive.

That, I believe, is a major issue. But with that solution, I'm not sure how it can be resolved, but I think most people will be willing to always do patches on a monthly, quarterly basis, as Oracle recommends.

They can increase the number of products available in free accounts for people to try. So many more people will be able to migrate to the cloud.

I have been using Oracle Database for approximately five years.

We are using both old and new versions.

Oracle Database is quite scalable.

They have a large number of options depending on the needs of the organization, allowing any organization to deploy according to their requirements. You can add or remove items as time allows, it's very scalable.

In our organization, we have more than 100, but less than 1,000 users.

Recently, I proposed the migration from on-premises to the cloud. I've noticed that alternatives are bringing a lot in the business, particularly in the cloud spectrum. Convincing customers to try to migrate to the cloud today is another task. It's more like there's something frightening there. I'm not sure what they're afraid of, but it's a matter of education and demonstration. I can download Oracle Database and experiment with it on my own, as long as I'm not using it for commercial purposes. I can do it if I try it on my own. 

I believe they should increase that even in the cloud. They have an Oracle Always Free account on the cloud, but it has a time limit, of a month. They will give you one month's free package for you to try. I have tried it many times. What I've noticed is that they should add more products to the Always Free account so that people, particularly on our continent, who are still skeptical of the cloud, are not left out.

They believe they will inquire as to where we will store our information. How do you know you're getting access to our data? As a result, there is still a lot of information that needs to be taught. I think the best thing Oracle could do is try to improve on that so that most people can keep trying and see that there's nothing to be skeptical about.

Technical support is quite good.

The initial setup is quite easy. In part, it is easy depending on the scope of the project. Maybe it's different for each project. For example, if you need to set up a rec, you need to know what is required, because this is a single database.

It took a few hours to deploy.

For my personal use, I completed the installation myself. 

When deploying for production, I worked with a partner who had a specialized team of system administrators and application developers.

This solution is only deployed and maintained by me.

It's been quite a long time since I looked into the price.

I believe they should also devote more time to learning Oracle. They will also notice that Oracle is not difficult to install or administer if best practices are followed. And, depending on your goals, I believe anyone can do it. Because Oracle Database has so many features, you can do audit vaults and data guides on it, depending on how you want to run your business.

Another thing I would recommend is that people be aware that Oracle has opened its website for people to sign up for free and then download the software for practice, study, or training purposes only. If you intend to use it for production purposes, that is when you should purchase a license.

Because of the prices, I would rate Oracle Database a nine out of ten, otherwise, I think that Oracle is still the best.

It depends on the environment. Most of our customers have been using multitenant options. Advanced Compression and Advanced Security are the most valuable features in most customer environments. And many customers are also leveraging Oracle Diagnostic and Tuning Packs to enhance the performance of the database. 

The primary concern is that Oracle is highly restricted in terms of the approved technologies where we can freely deploy Oracle Database or any other Oracle product. So, for example, if we deploy Oracle products on VMware vCenter or any virtualized environment using VMware technology, we need to license a complete cluster and a complete vCenter. So that is the costliest option for us. And since Oracle doesn't approve of Google Cloud infrastructure, that means we cannot leverage the dynamic and flexible features of Google Cloud. We have multiple offerings from Oracle and our side on this one. So if we want high performance, we have to get packs or options already bundled with Oracle Database at a slightly higher price. But they are cheaper if we purchase them separately.

Also, Oracle provides the Extreme Performance Database options where you have all the features already included with the database, which will overcome all the limitations that I mentioned earlier. So we can leverage different options, but the most important is to know what we need and how much we are ready to invest in setting up the Oracle solutions. Considering certain limitations on storing big data, so that's where Oracle lacks some features. But otherwise, it is one of the best databases available.

I've been working on Oracle Database and the complete Oracle Stack for the past six years. I'm not doing any implementation development work on Oracle products. I'm only managing their compliance part.

Oracle Database is pretty scalable. And if you are planning to implement or leverage the containers, Oracle has recently added enterprise containers into their stack, so we can leverage that technology to enhance the scalability of the database.

So with Oracle, technical support is provided mainly by the technical teams who are actually working on the packaging and deployment of the Oracle Database or other products.

Installing Oracle Database is pretty simple, and Oracle also provides a starter database, which will allow you to evaluate whether you meet the specifications or not. Then you can go ahead and deploy the other features and management packs.

Oracle Database has two different types of licenses. One is the Named User, and the other is the Oracle Processor. So Oracle Named User will cost you about $950 per license, and Oracle Processor will cost you around $47,500 per processor. And on the Named User part, you need a minimum number of users to ensure that you'll buy the minimum number of licenses. So for Enterprise Edition, the minimum requirement is 25 Named Users.

And you need to pay to add options and packs. All the options and packs are available at extra cost, but Enterprise Edition includes Spatial and Graph at no extra cost. Starting last year, Oracle offered Spatial and Graph for free with the Enterprise Edition. Then there is Standard Edition, a minimal deployment option. So you can deploy Standard Edition on a server with a maximum of two sockets. That's why Enterprise Edition is typical in most cluster and complex environments.

Oracle Database has various remarkable features like Advanced Security and Advanced Compression. Oracle Database has high availability and high performance. So in those terms, Oracle Database is much more reliable than its competitor. That's why most large enterprises choose Oracle Database technologies over others. But there are other databases with some features that Oracle doesn't have. For example, with MongoDB, you can store multimedia file content and anything, and they can hold a greater amount of data. So that's where they have an advantage on Oracle Database. And most of the social media sites, like Facebook, have implemented MongoDB as the database supporting their applications.

I would rate Oracle Database at eight out of 10. For those thinking about deploying the solution, my advice would to implement Oracle Database on physical servers to avoid noncompliance. And it will be less work to manage or calculate the required licenses on the physical server. If the customer wants to leverage the virtualization technology and has a more scalable environment, I would suggest having a dedicated cluster for Oracle products for licensing purposes. For example, if you keep five physical servers in a cluster, you need to license them only once. But if those five servers are running are part of five different clusters, you need to license all the five clusters. So having a dedicated cluster can save millions of dollars.

We primarily use the solution for the storing of data.

It can also be used for other purposes. For example, at the bank, and other financial institutions, they are using the database for transacting their information.

It's quite a big database. I have seen it in companies sized from medium to large enterprise-level. It also works for government organizations that are quite sizeable.

The solution is quite stable. When you work on planning for salaries, you can notice that Oracle is extremely stable.

It's a very flexible product. You are able to accomplish a lot of things.

It's extremely easy to use and the performance is great.

Oracle support is great. They are quite helpful when you run into problems. They help you overcome any issues. If you run into a bug, you contact support, and they solve it. 

If you have a stored database with the five standards that Oracle recommends, you will never experience something like, your database being down. 

The integration could be improved. If you are integrating with other Oracle products, it is fine, however, if your goal is to integrate with third-party products, Oracle isn't as good. There was a time when I was working on the other project and we were trying to integrate the database with Microsoft Active Directory. It was quite difficult to find a connection. We were eventually able to connect, however, it was quite difficult.

There's a new version right now. May have managed to rectify the issues with third-party integrations in that version. However, I haven't tested it yet. 

I've been using the solution for a couple of years now. It's been since 2010.

The stability is very, very good. There aren't really bugs and glitches, however, if there are, Oracle will help resolve them quickly. It doesn't crash or freeze. You never really have to worry about your database going down.

It's a big database. There is lots of room to scale. The solution can work well for large-scale organizations.

Depending on the number of the requirements, in terms of information, if you want to change the memory or you want to expand the storage, it has the capability to do that. So It's quite a flexible database.

Oracle has done a tremendous job of really allowing companies to scale in and out as needed.

I've worked with many clients and they've been of varying sizes. the company I am working with right now has 200 users on the solution.

We do plan to continue to use the solution and to upgrade to the new version, 19C.

We've used technical support in the past and they have always been very good. If you provide the information the way it's supposed to be presented - and that means being explicit in your issue - they can help you very fast. 

On-prem deployments take quite a long time. However, depending on what you want to achieve, it could go faster. Either you are doing the direct installation, which takes time, or you are doing a cloud deployment, and on the cloud, it takes less than five minutes to deploy. It's very, very fast.

We have about five people on our technical team that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks.

I can handle the installation myself. I've done both on-premises and cloud deployments at this point and both I am able to handle quite easily. I do not need the assistance of a consultant or integrator.

I work with clients and they are the ones that have to pay for the license. If they are using it for production purposes, they need to pay. I can't speak to the exact costs.

While we mostly work with on-premises deployments, I've recently also tried the cloud deployment.

We work with a variety of versions, including 11G, 12C, and 18C.

I recommend Oracle. I always do. They are an excellent company with a very good product.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Everyone should keep in mind that the way of the future is to move to the cloud. Oracle is working to support this. They're encouraging everyone to move to the cloud.

The solution is primarily used for any persistent storage of data. It's a database and Oracle is very strong on the relational database side. It's great for NoSQL. Oracle Database is a strong relational database management system.

The solution integrates well with third-party products. 

The high availability that it provides is definitely one of a kind. It's active-active and high availability.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

They have worked to make the initial setup a bit easier. 

They have improved a lot, however, recently it has been known that Oracle Database is very complex to manage. You need skilled people to manage it these days in the industry. The databases, which are very prevalent, are very developer-friendly, and most of the tasks are automated. You don't need to have a specialized DBA to look at the database stuff. That said, the ease of management for non-technical individuals could be better. 

Technical support quality has dropped recently. They aren't as helpful or responsive as they used to be. 

I've been dealing with the solution for more than 15 years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable. It has good high availability and is very reliable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have found the product to be scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem. 

Recently, I haven't had any experience with Oracle's tech support. However, I have heard it has gone down in quality. It's harder to get in touch with them. The support requests take a lot of time to resolve. On top of that, the kind of expertise or knowledge that someone would expect from the team is a little bit of concern now. They aren't as knowledgeable as they used to be.

While the solution used to be quite complex and difficult, now they have improved it. It's easier. That said, I can say it is still on the complex side.

Generally, when you buy Oracle Database, and if you're buying it for your own data center on the on-prem side, you have to go by the processor cores and the list price is around $47,500 for the enterprise edition per core.

It is a perpetual license; it is not something that you worry about on monthly basis. That said, they do have options now for the subscription-based model, however, there are more data points to be looked at. They have an offering called the data cloud and customer which is a subscription-based model. They can give you hardware plus some software licenses as well.

When it comes to Oracle and all the licensing policy that they have is very complex, the type of audits that they do is not really something that people welcome. 

We are a customer and an end-user.

In terms of deployments, you have an option to host it purely on-prem and you can arrange it to have some workloads on the cloud as well, as a hybrid approach. It is as if you are posting your databases on a private cloud in your own data center that way.

Normally, if someone has to look at different database options available, they would prefer an open-source product. They would go with Oracle if the application they want to host is not supporting any other database but Oracle. If a company has to go with Oracle, it is best to look into the possibility of hosting it on some cloud rather than on-prem.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. As a solution, it is not bad. The technology is great. It provides you with the features that you need. It is just that the cost and then the type of lock-in contract that you get into is not very attractive. As a product, from features and functionality alone, I would rate it a nine out of ten. However, when it comes to cost and other things, I'd rate it lower as there are open-source database options that are very good. 

It is deployed on AWS Cloud, but it is an IaaS setup, not the PaaS one.

We are using or leveraging Oracle DB for storing the transaction related details. Along with that we are heavily relying on the CCQ and setup that Oracle provides. They were sending a notification for any changes or transactional log audit purposes that we are using.

The features that I have found most valuable are things like cluster setup and RAC One. We are using the main CQN and third party plugin support right now. We are relying on different languages support that we are getting from the Oracle side. It is one of the major areas in which Oracle excels compared to other databases.

In terms of what could be improved vis-à-vis our use cases and requirements, there is nothing. Nonetheless, we are trying to move to other companies because of the licensing cost that we're incurring on a monthly basis. Other than that we are not seeing any performance issues or require additional add-ons based on our use cases.

I have been using Oracle Database for around four years.

It requires patching that we need to do manually from our end. To use the patches released from the Oracle side requires maintenance.

We have a dedicated team of DBA's that took care of the maintenance and dispatching. There are times reserved for that purpose, and during that time whenever a business requirement is very low or there is less load on the DB, that is when we do it.

It is quite stable.

The RAC One feature that I mentioned is one of the highlights of Oracle. We're using that for scalability and management. If we're increasing we can easily plug the nodes into the DB and we can distribute the load. It's not a problem.

Right now we are creating these transaction logs from different DBs that we have in place so it's not directly any application or anyone in these dealings. ETL jobs are defined and in place so that we can extract and dump the logs into the Oracle DB.

We have a team of administrators working on it.

Our team used to do it without any kind of technical challenges. Anything which we are not able to solve from our end our DBA team used to reach out to them.

We have a separate team who is doing all the tickets and stuff.

The initial setup is a bit complex because we need to define rules and permissions for each and every user's perspective. The initial setup took us a bit to put everything in place.

We were getting help from the Oracle DBA support when we we set up Oracle. 

Right now we are paying per license to Oracle and for whatever additional features we are leveraging. For that we need to pay extra on top of the license.

There are a lot of additional costs. That is the reason we are only leveraging for transactional related purposes, so that we do not spend so much on doing the same thing on Oracle. That is the reason we are looking for open source databases now.

As I mentioned previously, as per our use cases, the features that Oracle is currently providing are more than enough. We haven't seen any new features that should be included because all the features that we need to support our business requirements are there.

Oracle is a great DB. If you very heavily rely on it for very business-critical data and certain scaling is required or heavy requirements from the technology perspective, I would say Oracle is one of the best DB's. But for that you need to pay a heavy amount for the licensing costs. Everything is included in the package, but apart from a few additional features we also need to pay extra.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Oracle Database a 10.

We are using the solution for our online transaction system - that is debit cards - and we are using it for our loan origination system as well. There are two systems that are deployed on it and we are getting a good experience from it. 

The Data Guard feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The solution is stable.

The scalability is quite good. 

I have always found the technical support to be very helpful.

The solution is expensive. They should work at making the pricing more reasonable. 

They should be putting more emphasis on the Windows platform. Usually, they run very well on the Linux platform, however, their performance on Windows is a little bit lower quality.

They have to work on their flashback feature. Right now, it is a cumbersome process.

It is actually very heavy on the storage. If Oracle could do something about it, that would be great. 

I've been using the solution for the last 23 years at this point. It's been over two decades. I've used it for a long time. 

The stability is quite good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product is quite scalable. You can add as many servers as you would like to. It's not a problem.

The product is not deployed for the user base. It is deployed for the backend service. The amount of actual users is only one or two people. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. The cost is too much of a factor now. I'm not sure if I will be using it anymore. 

Technical support has been great. I am satisfied with the level of service we receive. 

We have Oracle Database and SQL Central Server Database in our environment. We're moving to SQL based on the generally high cost of Oracle. 

The initial setup is very straightforward.

I'm very comfortable with Oracle as well, so for me, it was very, very convenient. I can't speak to the end-user or a user with the lower skillset in terms of their capabilities of setting it up. However, if you have some experience with Oracle, it's not bad.

The deployment only takes 45 minutes to an hour. It doesn't take long.

I have installed it personally and it is very straightforward. However, it is possible to use an integrator or consultant to get the proper assistance. 

We don't really calculate the ROI on the database itself. We calculate the ROI for the system. On whichever system is deployed on a database, we calculate it on a community basis. Therefore, of course, we get the ROI from whatever technology we deploy.

While I'm a fan of Oracle as a solution, I am not a fan of the cost. It is very expensive. 

For medium to small organizations, the current cost might not be viable as compared to SQL Server, which is much cheaper than Oracle and provides approximately the same functionality that they have. 

You can choose a core-based license or a user-based license. There are no extra costs above the standard licensing fees. Typically it is a five-year contract that can be paid monthly or yearly. 

We are a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise those considering the solution to always keep their logs on a different database. Also, they have to make sure the parameterization they do in their initial setup is very, very extensively thought out.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I use Oracle Database to support the customized Java ERP setup that I currently have.

Oracle Database has improved how we do our administrative backups. The solution has a smaller footprint than 11g, it's more efficient on the resources for the users. It has a smoother user experience with the ERP and fewer field transactions.

Oracle Database is running on the same old hardware that I had the 11g version on and it is operating faster. It seems to be really good. It's fast even when the workload is heavy, easy to do backups and other administrative tasks with the Enterprise Manager. 

Oracle Database can automatically assign resources to threads that are heavy. We hardly notice when they are running a heavy query and it is better at managing memory than the older 11g version. When we use the same amount of indexes when migrating to 19c, I didn't have to do any other modification and we have increased usage on the ERP. The Oracle Database is handling everything very well.

Oracle Database could improve by having a better-integrated view of the containerized databases. The Enterprise Manager is great at that, but if there was a centralized view of all the containers it would be a large benefit.

I have been using Oracle Database for approximately one year.

The reliability of the Oracle Database is excellent and the performance is very good. I have used MySQL for large transactions which have given me some problems, but in Oracle Database version 19c I have not had these issues. In the Oracle Database version 11g, sometimes I would have some lagging, but in the newer version, it has been fine.

The scalability of the solution is good.

We have approximately 70 users that are using the solution through the ERP.

The support I have received from Oracle Database has been very great. The response times have been good.

I have previously used MySQL.

The initial setup of Oracle Database is straightforward, it was easy. The migration from an older version was not a problem at all, and it took under one hour.

I did the implementation mostly myself, but because of the ERP setup, I had to have support from the vendor. It was a partnership setup.

I do the maintenance of the solution, we only require one person. I use the solution on a daily basis.

Oracle Database could make the documentation better around licensing. The way you have to access software from Oracle is difficult. You have to go through the licensing lawyer to understand what your reach is when you subscribe to one unit. I wish the documents were easier to understand for everyone. This is a problem I have always grappled with and it's not changed. Having clarity is even more important now that I'm thinking of having a hybrid setup for the database in the cloud for high availability.

The cost of the solution is reasonable. It costs approximately $4,000 with some extra features we have.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, it does depend on different organizations and their needs. If the resources are a little heavy, which makes for disaster recovery planning, a little bit tricky.  

I would advise people to explore how their workloads would be and if they can be containerized in the cloud. That would make it way easier for them to manage them. The scalability of Oracle Database is very easy to grow or shrink as the need.

I rate Oracle Database a nine out of ten.