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.

The solution is the main database storage for the application that we have. We offer an online purchasing system to our major customer, which is a government. They deal with their purchasing through the solution.

The organization can't function without it working properly as there would be a lot of upset people complaining. It's fairly integral to the overall functionality of the company.

The solution's most valuable aspect is its reliability. In about 17 years, I believe I may have lost about 15 minutes worth of data.

Overall, the solution works very well. It has excellent performance. 

The solution is very stable.

Especially with VMs, the solution can scale well.

I'm not crazy about their new version plan that they've just started. It seems like it turns over too quickly. We may have to upgrade within the year, and I really am not crazy about that. I don't want to upgrade so soon. We may not have a choice.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

Technical support could be more consistent.

They used to have something called a database console in version 11. That was very good. It seems like they reduced its functionality over the past couple of versions. I'd like to see that back to the way in which it used to be.

I've been using the solution for 17 years. It's been over a decade - in fact, it's almost been two.

The solution is very stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's quite reliable.

The scalability of the solution is quite good. If a company needs to expand, it can do so relatively easily. 

When you were just with bare metal, it wouldn't be as good as it is now with virtual machines as it does not take a lot to spin up another virtual machine and put Oracle on it and have it working. In the old days, when you had a piece of metal, you had to find another piece of metal, get it installed, and then start scaling up from there. With the VM, it's a lot better.

I'd rate technical support seven out of ten. They could improve it a bit.

There've been times in which it's been absolutely tremendous. Then there've been other times where it just seemed to take too long. Either the person didn't know enough and had to go to other people and such, and it just took way too long. It's been mixed in terms of results. It's not exactly consistent.

It's my understanding that the company has always used Oracle. The company I've been with has been with Oracle for pretty much all of its life. I haven't seen any other solutions.

The initial setup isn't straightforward. It's a bit complex. 

With the setup of it, you need operating system people, whether it be Linux or Windows or whatever operating system, and they need to be coordinating with you. Usually, we're just putting the software on top of an operating system. However, with this, it's just not something that you can just throw out there. You need to have some preparation done, whether it be a VM or a piece of metal.

In implementing the product, the product has gotten simpler to implement over time. Whether you choose to use the cloud or whether you choose to have it on-premises, it has gotten simpler to install. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't preparation that you need to do in regards to the operating system and having everything ready for it.

We have two DBAs, myself and another person. As far as mainline support, we have a couple of units admins that manage the VMs and the hardware that we still have at the moment. And we have some Windows admins, which help with the web interface to the database with the application.

It's best to have some professionals assist with the setup.

We're just a customer and end-user.

I've used various versions of the solution, starting with 10 and moving to 18. We're still a few versions back, and therefore aren't using the latest. The latest is 20 and they are about to release 21.

I'd advise those considering implementing the solution to do some preparation beforehand. This will help ensure a successful setup.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. There are some improvements that can be made here and there. However, it's largely stable and works well.

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.

The solution is primarily used for support servicing. The whole IT infrastructure uses Oracle. Oracle is a focal point. It's transactional processing as well as data warehousing.

The solution's most valuable aspect is its reliability. It just works. You never have to worry about it.

I've worked with the solution so well, I have a very strong understanding of it as a whole. I know everything about it. I'm very comfortable with it.

The solution can scale well.

The stability of the product is excellent.

Installing, configuring, and supporting an Oracle RAC system is a very complex task that requires special skills. A novice who has never done it before will struggle. Therefore, I think that in the future all Oracle RDBMS customers will gradually switch to cloud databases, preferably, to Oracle cloud.

It takes a significant amount of time after submitting an initial SR with Oracle Tech Support before your case reaches a technical expert with whom you can actually work on the issue resolution. Before that, you have to deal with people who are not experts.

Oracle RDBMS is expensive.

I've been working with Oracle since 1994. I have a long history with the solution.

The stability of the solution is excellent. The performance and reliability are great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very good overall.

Oracle is very, very scalable. If a company needs to expand the solution, it can do so.

Our organization is quite large. There are hundreds of IT personnel using Oracle.

I've dealt with technical support in the past and I personally do not find them to be very good. 

Usually, it starts very slowly. Before you get to the right people, you go through the people who hardly understand the problem and they keep asking stupid questions. Then only after a couple of weeks, you finally get in touch with the person who really understands. It's at that moment that your work starts. However, before that, you have to go through the process of finding someone to answer your question. 

They need to make the process faster or hire people who understand the solution better.

Currently, our organization is moving away from Oracle. They're moving to Amazon AWS and they're considering several databases, as a potential alternative. This is due to the fact that Oracle is very expensive.

In truth, I'm not sure the company will ever be able to get rid of Oracle, as it would require rewriting everything. Currently, Oracle is the basis for everything. Just to switch to something else, they would have to rewrite everything. It will be a huge undertaking, and it would take several years.

The initial setup is not exactly straightforward. Real-life Oracle installation is very complex and a regular non-proficient person can hardly do that. I am not an Oracle DBA, however, many years ago I was an Oracle DBA. I don't have the certification. However, when I tried to install Oracle on a cluster of Linux machines to do some cleaning, it took me several weeks. I had to go through Oracle documentation, and I was trying and failing. Finally, I made it work, however, it was really difficult. Even for me, with so much knowledge of the system, Oracle installation is really difficult. Years from now, likely nobody will be doing it at all. Everybody will be using Oracle cloud instead.

We have quite a few people maintaining the solution, as we are a sizable organization.

It's best to have a professionally licensed individual assist in the implementation process.

The pricing is extremely high. It's one of the reasons our organization is looking for an alternative. They would like to move away from Oracle to lower their costs.

I'm a customer and end-user.

I would advise organizations considering Oracle to not do on-premises. The best way, nowadays, is just to pay money to Oracle and use Oracle-managed databases from the cloud. They don't require a data center for the hardware. Cloud computing, is what people should do instead.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. That said, I am aware that it is quite an expensive option for most organizations. Even our company, which is quite sizeable, finds the overhead costs high.

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. 

I use Oracle in two systems. The first one is called the Complaint Management System, and the second one was for Human Resources for the Ministry of Electricity in Iraq. 

The Complaint Management System is related to a call center. There is a call center responsible for writing down the complaints from the customers about their network electricity. If there is an error they reach out to us. There is an operator there writing down this complaint using his terminal. There are many different call centers in the country and all of them write up these complaints using the Oracle Database.

Oracle has always been a wonderful database. 

It is reliable. It's very stable. 

The solution has everything you are looking for in terms of features on offer. It's very complete. 

The solution can be quite expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on the pricing model in order to figure out how to lower the licensing.

It takes time to learn Oracle. There's a bit of a learning curve. It's not easy to use at first, however, slowly, day by day, you can get and develop your skills. 

There are a lot of YouTube videos and tons of material on Google that you can access. You can also easily find so many training institutes all over the world if you really want to understand aspects of the product. It would be ideal if Oracle could initiate some sort of learning center in Iraq. Even if it's just on Youtube, if it can be catered towards Iraqis to showcase the technology in the form of online Youtube videos or webinars, it would be extremely useful for expanding the solution within the Iraqi market. Right now, competitors like Microsoft can easily come in and just say "here's what we do, and at less cost than Oracle".

The initial setup is a little complex.

I've been using the solution for about ten years at this point. It's been around a decade, and therefore I've used it for quite a while.

The solution is stable most of the time. Unfortunately, I faced a few different issues. I was luckily able to solve them.

It's very important, if you choose Oracle as a solution, to also get the support as well. You can technically live without it, however, if you run into issues, Oracle can help you when you have the support that they offer.

In my case, I didn't have support so I had to kind-of feel around for a solution. I made the mistake, after the first year, of not renewing my support and I really should have.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it outward, it can do so.

While it's my understanding that technical support is good, frankly, for the first year, I didn't ask them for any help. Therefore, I don't have any experience with Oracle support.

That said, I have full faith that they will respond very well to any issues.

In my case, I had support for the first year of service and then did not renew it. You really should renew though. 

The initial setup was not really so straightforward. It's actually rather complex.

There are two ways to start with Oracle. You can go in by yourself and try to learn as you go or you can study a bit at an institute or school so that you can get pretty comfortable with the product. If you have some knowledge, there's less of a learning curve during installation.

The support does cost extra, however, it is worth the extra money. It really comes in handy if you run into problems.

We're just customers and end-users. We don't have a partnership or special business relationship with Oracle.

I really enjoy using the solution. It is stable and reliable. 

It's more expensive than Microsoft's options, however, I personally prefer working with it. It's worth the extra money. 

Aside from stability issues and a certain level of complexity, it's quite a good solution. I would rate it eight out of ten.