Oracle Database Reviews

We are using the database mainly at the hospital, where I work now. We have been working with Oracle Database to save all the data related to the patients.

Using the product, we make less mistakes, are more organized and faster than if we did it any another way.

• Stability
• Name recognition of the database in the world, as it is maybe the best one.

There are a lot of bugs in the Oracle Database, and it would be better if the bugs would be solved more quickly than they are today.

The bugs could be anything. They could be related to any problem. For example, we had a problem with the physical standby, and the bugs had already been there for a few years in the databases, but not solved in the newer versions.

Since we moved to Linux two years ago, it has been much more stable. We were very happy that we moved.

We are already working in Iraq. We also bought Oracle Database Appliance, and we are happy with that product too.

In general, the support is not good since most of the time the person whom you are given to is not so professional. Though, the last time that we had a big problem with our Database Appliance, we received support from Oracle US, and it was much better.

It is not so straightforward, but it is not so complex.

The price is very expensive for the support.

When I started to work at my company, they were already working with Oracle Database.

Oracle has a very good database, but it is very expensive today, and there are a lot of competitors.

Main criteria for selecting a vendor: 

• Name
• Release of new versions
• Stability.

We’re using Oracle Database at our customers and for any vast applications, for data warehouses, online transaction processing applications, with packaged applications like Siebel and SAP that work with Oracle. Oracle is the main enterprise database for the finance sector today, in general.

It fits any kind of model that we would like to incorporate in our organization, whether it's a data warehouse, implementing data models, CRMs, or online application processing. We can use clusters, we have very sophisticated, high-availability solutions. We have everything.

We generally incorporate all the solutions in an enterprise so that we can help the enterprise to have a better, high-availability solution, faster databases. 

And, compared to other databases, Oracle Database is very simple to manage in terms of the database itself.

Oracle is one of the most advanced systems when compared with other databases in the market. Oracle has the ability to combine all the sophisticated architectures that we have today in the market and bring them to the customer.

One more nice thing that Oracle is bringing in is cloud on premises. This allows you to have a big Exadata machine in your enterprise and use it as a cloud, using all the available Oracle features, which is very nice. It gives you the ability to begin according to your needs and grow very fast when you need to do so.

Oracle is going now to what we call autonomous databases. Personally, I don’t believe in autonomous databases that will manage themselves. It might be that in the cloud versions they actually have the ability of doing that for you, managing the infrastructure, fixing all the patches that you need, and so on. Still, the tuning business has a long way to go to be completely autonomous. There is still a need for a person to manage the database, especially the performance and tuning. 

It might be those future databases - not in the near future but in the distant future - will be autonomous completely. Oracle could be one of the first to incorporate that.

Oracle has new versions, and with them it becomes more stable. Compared to other databases, especially when dealing with vast numbers of records, Oracle is one of the leading databases; it performs much better.

Scalability is one of the biggest features of Oracle Database. We can scale out or scale in using clusters, using the shard solutions that we have in the market today. Oracle brings a large number of methods for scaling.

Support is one of the most advanced. I work with other vendors besides Oracle. If I compare the support that we have with Oracle to other leading providers -  I don’t want to say the names - Oracle usually gives me answers quickly. With other vendors, I can wait for ages until I get answers, if I can get a solution at all. Oracle has a vast knowledge of problems and solutions.

For 80 percent of problems, you can find already built-in solutions. But if such a solution doesn't exist, Oracle support is prompt. They come in and discuss the problems with you and try to figure out very fastest solutions.

We didn’t switch. Oracle has always been a leader in the field of relational databases. Today, in Israel especially, all the finest companies have their major databases in Oracle, in spite of the licensing, because it is one of the best databases in the market. The big companies can still afford the licenses.

Setup has become easier and easier with Oracle. It used to be a bit complicated in the beginning, but with the new versions, while you still need a bit of knowledge, it’s quite doable to install it and manage it.

The main issue where I feel that Oracle still has a problem is with the licensing. Licensing is still expensive and the reason why today most startups use other, cheaper databases. Those other databases are much less sophisticated than Oracle. I hope that in the future, Oracle will reach a level where it can introduce its database with different compliances and different licenses so that companies will be able to use to it and it will be competitive with other databases in the market.

When selecting a vendor, the most important thing is that they have people who know the business. We have some databases, for example, for which it is very rare to find a person who knows something about them. Knowledge is important. Support of the product is very, important as well. We need to know where to go, who to ask, who will actually help us out with the problems. Of course, bringing new innovations and being out front with what is happening in the advancing of the technology are also important.

My advice, especially for big companies today, would be to go to the cloud on-premises when starting out, which allows you to incorporate all the latest versions from Oracle yet have the infrastructure managed by the Oracle Cloud support team. It gives you the ability to utilize the best of Oracle and to scale when you need to. 

For smaller companies, the main reason they are not going with Oracle today is the pricing/licensing. I hope that, in the future, Oracle will do something about that so we'll once again see small companies beginning with Oracle, something that we don’t see today.

Storage of data and alerts.

In the past we used another product. Since the switch to Oracle the stability has improved.

We had some issues with the scalability but we managed to find a solution without overturning everything or having to go back to the basics.

The reason I do not give this product a 10 out of 10 is because of the technical support. This is an area where they need to improve. It takes too long. If you have an issue that is very complicated, not something that you can find a solution for on the internet, that you need an engineer to help with, it takes too long. Very often, I find the solution by myself and give up on the support.

When choosing a vendor it's important to me that it is a good brand, that they have a good name in the market, and that the solution comes closest to meeting my needs.

I would definitely recommend this solution.

We store our data in a database. We have a lot of data. We load it in our database everyday, then use it for reports.

This is the main database that we have.

Stores a lot of data in a short time.

• Integration with big data would be helpful since we are planning to load a lot of big data.
• A lot of features have bugs or choose the wrong way to process data. Sometimes, we struggle with that.

It is very stable.

For our needs, scalability is okay.

We have a DBA who does our support.

I would recommend the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• The product should be good.
• Features
• Its stability.

• Security and Scalability
• I have used Oracle technologies for last two decades apart from other similar vendors like MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, etc.

It helped build a strong core application layer

Its a natural choice for any complex enterprise relational system

• Security and Scalability
• I have used Oracle technologies for last two decades apart from other similar vendors like MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, etc.
• Power of Oracle combined with robust Unix platforms like Linux or AIX makes it powerful and secure as compared to MS SQL on Windows 
• IBM DB2 needs indepth technical expertise and lot of workarounds or automation to build a strong solution, MS SQL is on Windows and that makes it not the best choice

Support and Patching.

I found MS SQL Server support more helpful in many cases where in they internally rope in technology experts from different layers rather than pushing back on the clients, something Oracle can incorporate for sure.

Multiple issues, but mostly triggered from lower layers like OS, Network, storage layers.

Oracle GRID is sensitive to underlying network and disk timeouts and node evictions may happen if disk and network systems are not optimized

Oracle systems are highly scalable, Backup and Recovery strategy needs to be tweaked and is not as scalable as core database system. It needs some special attention to meet your RTO

Customer Service:

I would rate it 6/10. Many times the support is not able to solve the problems and they would put you into loops and escalate to their dev team which may take months to come back with a solution. Sometimes the solution never arrives and you are forced to upgrade to higher version.

Technical Support:

I would rate it 7/10.

Enterprise systems for financial institutions hosting both core systems and business support systems. This includes both OLTP and data warehouse databases. 

It has improved my organisation with the stability of its systems. The team is well-versed with the management of Oracle more than any other database. It is flexible, scalable, and a true Enterprise RDBMS.

• High availability using real application clusters.
• Disaster recovery using Oracle Data Guard.
• Scalable storage using Automatic Storage Management.
• Security is watertight. Database Vault is my favourite.

Auditing could be improved, especially granular auditing. The unified audit trail in 12c is great, however its extraction in a highly busy environment is quite a challenge.

Oracle RDBMS is being used for our SAP ERP, analytics, SAP SRM, SAP SCM , SAP BOBJ, and SAP Solman.

It is reliable and well accepted. 

It gives DB consistency, supports disaster recovery (DR), is tunable, and handles large DB sizes.

The compression does not give much value-add or provide performance benefits as was highlighted.

Cloud installations using Oracle are not supported by SAP.

The license cost needs to be optimized. The licensing cost is very high compared to other RDBMS. 

Oracle Database is cloud ready, not only for the software standardization, but also for the scripting. You can install Oracle Database software, patching, and create/configure Oracle databases in silent using scripts. Therefore, you can easily automate everything in cloud.

Performance is the best key value. Oracle Database is suitable for OLTP applications or data warehouse. You can run Oracle Database software on-premise or in the cloud. Also, Oracle provides Exadata, the engineered system designed for Oracle Database, where you can achieve maximum performance.

Upgrade is the most critical phase for the lifecycle of a database. In order to be sure that the migration succeeds, you need to be up-to-date. Therefore, regularly install the patchset and security updates.

No. The most critical error was due to a bug on database policies, so selecting it got the wrong results.

No issues.

I would give technical support a seven out of 10 rating.

As of now, I use different database solutions depending on the use case (for example, MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server).

It is not complex, but you need to be aware of the best practices provided by Oracle. Therefore, I recommend to read the official documentation before starting a new Oracle installation. Also, be informed of the known issues using My Oracle Support.

If it is the first time implementing, contact a partner or an expert in order to install/configure your Oracle Database. This is the best way or think about Oracle PaaS in the Cloud.

Not in my scope.