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.

We work with a bank and our core banking application sits on Oracle Database. Most of the applications in our ecosystem are all developed on Oracle RDBMS, so Oracle Database. They are all running mostly on Oracle Database. I'd estimate that 75-80% of our applications all run on Oracle Database in our environment.

The solution has been around for a long time, so it's very mature. We've used various versions, from 8 to 12 c. The RDBM has a strong reputation.

The solution is able to run on different types of machines, from IBM AIX to UNIX.

The solution has very robust integrity due to how it is designed and implemented.

The security is very tight. Users can be very sure of Oracle's safety. It has a variety of different security layers that make it very, very safe.

Oracle offers a great disaster recovery tool called Oracle Data Guard, which is fantastic.

The solution has very good failover capabilities. You can do it manually or automate the process if you like. It's all very transparent.

You can query around the rack as well you call it the rack cluster. There's great availability. It helps to handle high availability within the nodes. Even if you have a problem with one server, the others are still available and will continue the job without going down. 

We work in a back-end environment that is mission-critical, and we cannot afford downtime. Oracle is a perfect solution, as it will never go down. Customers will always be served at any point without experiencing a delay, which is of vital importance to banking.

Oracle is constantly working to improve its products. It now offers AI and machine learning capabilities to run queries.

There's lots of research and development being done constantly. This ensures they are always one step ahead of other databases.

The solution can be quite expensive for small and medium-sized enterprises. Not too many companies can actually afford the pricing.

The way it is designed, there are a lot of constraints on the solution. Everything doesn't just happen at once.

Oracle doesn't handle SQL. You can use other products for that instead, including another Oracle product. If you need SQL, you can use MongoDB, MariaDB, or the Cassandras.

I've been using the solution for fifteen years now.

Oracle Database is 200% stable. Most of the time when you have issues, it's not with Oracle but with the applications that are running on it that are not properly tuned. Oracle, however, if absolutely reliable.

The causes on the application end need to be properly looked at and tuned up properly, to reduce the overhead costs that are there. The loads are something we can have effect if we need to, and that's where we usually see problems.

We do a lot of scaling. When we need to scale, we need to go through the Change Application Board at the company to make sure everything is properly documented, and everyone is made aware of the changes. When you scale or make changes on the system, it doesn't lead to downtime. that's extremely important to note. We use a rank model where you do changes one node at a time.

Ultimately, the solution is very easy to scale.

We are satisfied with technical support. 

However, people need to know how to manage Oracle support. Around here, we added what we call Advanced Customer Support, Oracle ACS. This is white-glove service for items that are of critical importance.  

With Advanced Customer Support, if they need to fly down, they will fly down and come directly to you to help you look at further into very critical issues. With their premier support, which is still quite good, I would rate them 90%, however, with ACS, I would rate them 100% satisfactory.

I've worked with other databases in the past.

In terms of the ruggedness of the database, especially in relational databases, I find Oracle design very strong. I want to believe that so many of the other databases that started coming up were trying to imitate what Oracle had. However, when you talk about databases holding data, they are managing very large databases, Oracle is still what you would want to go for.

For smaller data, there are other relational databases that are good. However, if the customer must have a response that will be like the speed of light, then you still have to go for Oracle.

The difficulty of the initial setup varies. It depends on the company and who is setting it up. The truth of the matter is that you need a little bit of experience to be able to manage Oracle. That is why not every Database Administrator that does it for Oracle is a specialist in running it on a Unix level environment. Once you are able to get to that level, there is a pretty good graphical user interface that brings you through the selection process. You need SPS to do some form of tuning.

Were paid to set up the solution appropriately. We try to mitigate any performance issues and to lay out the parameters. You really need to look at memory and to look at your LGA to have a successful implementation. It all requires quite a bit of knowledge. You can't just be experienced in databases; you need to be experienced specifically in Oracle. In that sense, overall, it's not too straightforward.

To deploy the solution, the amount of time also depends on a lot of factors, including the person's experience with Oracle, and the company's overall requirements. With my experience, I can do it within a few hours.

For deployment, you would need a small team to assist in the process. You must always ensure the continuity of the business, so it's smart to not just rely on one person. If your database has two terabytes of data, you'll need a solid team with a minimum of five people on it. That way, everything is managed competently and everything is proactively monitored. For the bank, we have a team of 15 people managing the entire database for the group.

This solution is definitely geared towards larger enterprises. It's quite expensive.

Currently, we're using the 12c version fo the solution and we're migrating over to the 18c version soon. We're mostly using the on-premises versions, however, we're likely to migrate over to the cloud in the future.

Having used other products, I can say that hands down Oracle DB is a fantastic product.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We work in agriculture, and where we're located we have two sites in two separate cities in Canada. These are all transactional databases and they have information in them about the dairy industry in our country. We use it for storing data related to dairy cows, dairy farmers, or farmers in general, and we have all the information in the transactional database that holds everything from billing to individual animal data. We probably have about 12 terabytes of data on the Oracle databases.

The reliability and the ability to store all the information we need is how it helps us the most. I don't know the metrics of the top of my head, I just know it works. 

We decided to use Oracle from the start because of its reputation of robustness. It provided us with everything that we needed. 

The reliability is the solution's most valuable feature. We've had great success with the solution.

The ability to do all the programming we need in one solution is great.

The support has been very good over the years.

The main thing we find could use improvement is the licensing costs. It is quite expensive relative to other database vendors. Cost always comes up as an issue for us as we consider upgrade paths. It's not as easy as we would like it to be. 

While we really like Oracle, it's difficult sometimes to upgrade from version to version.

I'd like to see the high availability option become available in the standard edition. We have a couple of databases that are still in the standard edition, and we'd like to be able to back those up and have higher availability.

We've been using Oracle for a long time. We originally started using it in 1999 just before the Y2K crisis.

The stability is very good. I'd rate it ten out of ten. We have some databases that run for a year without rebooting or anything, so I would describe it as very stable.

We do have a couple of international projects for our users that will be accessed from other countries, but it's currently stable.

There's no problem with scalability. It's quite easy for an organization to expand if they need to.

We have many users on the solution, including myself, and I have an administrator role. We have five database administrators that manage the day to day operations of the database. Then we have about 20 developers that develop different applications or make changes to the database for us. There are also internal users. We probably have, I'd say, 500 employees that have access at any given time. Our customers also have access. In total, we have about 15,000 people on the solution.

Technical support, on a scale of one to ten, I would give a seven. There are some things that take a little bit longer to resolve than others, however, overall, I would say it's good. It's not very good. It's not excellent. It's good.

We haven't gone anywhere else and tried any other database software. We did previously use IBM's Mainframe 20 years ago.

The reason why we switched was because we were changing our data center. It's a little bit complicated, but there used to be four organizations that did the same thing we did. And due to the Y2K scare, we decided to merge all these organizations into one data center. It was more of consolidation from different technologies into one Oracle technology.

I was not really involved in that migration. I was there, however, I didn't have a role in it. Oracle was ultimately chosen based on the robustness and they had. 

It was a very big undertaking. We moved from an IBM mainframe. With regards to Oracle, the set up was, I would say, easy, however, when you're building a database, there's a lot of things to think of. That's not really the database's problem. You have to think of and plan out your table structure. You have to think of how you're going to set up your database. 

The deployment happened 20 years ago. It was a very big project. The implementation took a year to migrate our existing data into an Oracle database. It went well, although it did take about a year to implement.

You need about five people to handle maintenance on the solution.

We used a consulting firm to assist us in the implementation at the time. The experience was good at the time. Still, it was 20 years ago. They're actually out of business now. They may have gone out of business ten years ago, or merged with another company.

Our licensing costs are between $40,000 and $50,000 per year. Those are the costs that cover maintenance and licensing. 

We have an enterprise edition. We pay extra for features that are only available with this particular tier.

We did evaluate different databases, including IBM's Db2. And that was it at the time. Microsoft didn't exist back then for databases.

We started using version 7 of Oracle, and now, after so many years on the product, we are up to version 12.

We have six different main production databases that we use for various things. They're all on-premise. They either run in a Linux environment or IBM AIX Unix environment. And we also use a backup Oracle cloud for backing up some of those databases.

The main advice I would give other organizations would be to prepare for the costs. Oracle is kind of more expensive than in most other database software. It's also important to have a good understanding of how Oracle works and the programming. It's quite specialized. However, if you're implementing a big database environment, you need to know that anyway. 

Oracle is, I would say, probably the top database provider in the world. Having a big name, for us, was good because we've got other contracts from outside firms that trust us because we house our data with Oracle. 

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for, and we don't mind paying more for the peace of mind we get from this solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten mostly due to the fact that it's a very solid platform and it's robust and it's scalable. It's the Cadillac of the database world.

I am an end-user of the Oracle database. The only use of Oracle is the repository of the data. So from the end-user side, it is transparent. A database is a good database if it does not slow down production or data processing. That the database prevents data from being exposed to any malware or any malicious scripting is a good idea. Oracle has these capabilities.

Oracle is simply a reliable data warehouse for us.

Our Oracle database is very expensive, so probably the cost is an area that can be improved. The cost of the product.

The actual features that might need to be improved is a question that is better answered by any IT person or administrator because they know specifically what are the limitations and what the challenges that they face in using the product or the brand.

On the end-user side, it is all transparent and we depend completely on the administration to care for the stability of the product. So we do not know what they experience on the administrative end as we are isolated from those issues. I don't know if the services are slowing down or if there's an issue and the product is not performing as expected.

If something happens and there is a switchover to using the back-up or something like that, we do not see any of that as end-users. 

I have been using the product for about 12 years with the same company.

I do not have any idea about the specifics of the stability because that is usually taken care of by the IT department. From an end-user standpoint, the stability is very good. At least that is the case for us as the IT department is doing their job.

But definitely as of this moment, due to the COVID crisis, we are not going into the direction of expanding any software or hardware inventory. Everything was put on hold to maximize the usage of current assets.

But of course, Oracle is a scalable solution. We are hoping to go in that direction. If you have a solution that is not scalable, then you probably will be left behind. All software seems to be taking that direction in offering scalability and flexibility.

Oracle can be deployed into whatever architecture you have right now. Whether it be on-prem, on the cloud, or a mix or hybrid. Probably that is a good point for Oracle.

I have not heard about any problems with technical support from Oracle and I also do not hear about any escalations regarding support from our IT department. I have not heard about any reports that the Oracle Database has been down.

So the product is good and the back-end support is good.

We have been using this Oracle solution from the time that I arrived at this company so there has not been any other product in use.

The setup is taken care of and maintained by the IT and administration. 

I am not exactly sure of the precise cost, but I do know that the cost of the product is very expensive compared to some other solutions. Even though we are in a third world country, we do not enjoy any discount for our situation and economy.

As far as I am aware this is the only product that was considered because of its reputation and performance.

The advice I have for other people considering this solution is that if they have money then they should go for it. We do not experience performance issues or trouble with throughput.

It is probably a good idea to do some research for use in documentation which can be searched or located on the Internet. I think every company that is looking into creating value from their software assets, they have to do research or evaluation first on the Internet.

They should be sure, before making an investment that the product fits their requirements, probably they will contact a distributor or supplier to get the product.

The next important step would be the proof of concept. They must try to do a POC or work with a demo and see if the Oracle Database can solve the pain points that they are having right now.

One factor they can not forget is the budget. If the product fits their needs but not their budget, they will have to try to fit their budget to the product and make it work perhaps by scaling usage.

On the scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate Oracle Database as probably around and eight-out-of-ten. That is a good rating. The price is really the only thing which is holding it back from a better score.

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.