Oracle Database Reviews

I think that Oracle today is the most powerful relational database, especially for PCI compliance, high availability, and high performance. Those are the Oracle database features I most appreciate.

I am waiting for Oracle to provide an interface between NoSQL and the Oracle database, so I don't have to go deeply into NoSQL. I just need to have an interface between them; to use SQL language to check that NoSQL or Hadoop is not down, and so-on.

We have been using it for more than 15 years.

The most important down time you can have for developers is when we upgrade from one version to another.

Otherwise, we have not had any stability issues, especially with 10g or 11g.

It's a very, very strong database.

It is scalable, especially with RAC. We can add more had more processors on the machine and through Oracle, I can use only part of the CPU on the server, so I don't have to pay too much.

Technical support is good, very good. It's a little bit expensive, but very efficient.

Initial setup is not difficult. For me, it's very easy, because I have a lot of experience on it.

The important thing with Oracle is that everywhere you go on Google, you see a million people have experienced the same problem. You always have something when you have an issue.

You should buy this solution. That's what I'm saying, in my company, a very big company. Every time someone asks, that’s what I say, because I'm involved with Oracle a lot. That's normal.

I like the fact it works the most. It's reliable; it works well in Solaris in a UNIX system; that’s the most valuable feature.

The price is where it can be improved. It should be cheaper. Then, it would be more accessible to everybody because right now, it's actually only accessible for big corporations. If you want to try and do it yourself, it's not very easy.

I know there is the free version, but it's very limited with the amount of memory and CPU power that you can use, which is, again, very limited if you want to do something more heavy.

Also, I'm not sure how the good the support for JSON is because I know that you can push JSON directly to PostgreSQL and some other databases. I'm not sure that Oracle supports it. I know that Oracle is really a relational database. It's always relations and SQL but now there's a move to more SQL databases and document storage, something like that would also be very useful. I'm not sure how actually feasible that is.

I have been using it since 2006, with a three-year break when I was working at a company that didn’t use it.

It didn’t crash; it was reliable.

I was never involved in scaling it because I've always been involved with the software part. However, I heard that scaling it is not that easy and that you really need a special guy to do it. It's not really out of the box as it should be. That's at least what I was told, but, again, I never really touched it.

The most situations where I used it, we didn't use clusters or anything. It was usually master-slave or only just master. In those cases, it worked well for us.

I only touched the online support and it's really not very useful because it's very difficult to find what you're looking for. Whenever I tried to actually find something for myself, it didn't really work well.

The last time I set it up was a long time ago. As far as I remember, it was straightforward. It was just, Next, Next, Next and that was it. I don't remember whether there was filling out a lot of fields. I was only putting it on a development machine. I didn't put it in production. That was someone else. Even if something crashed, I could just do it again without any problems.

It all depends. If you want something out of the box that will work, then Oracle is a good solution. If you want to pack it with a bit more and actually do some customization and all these kind of things, then I think that MySQL is much better; MariaDB as well; also, PostgreSQL.

If you're actually looking for a relational database, then that would be that. If you're more interested in NoSQL databases, document storage, then I would recommend MongoDB, Cassandra, and those kinds of things. Again, it really depends from what's your use case.

It's probably one of the rapidly expanding database technologies in the world and has one of the best feature sets that an RDBMS can provide.

There are a lot of Oracle MR features that are pretty much unique in the database world. Some of them are pretty outstanding, especially those that enable cloud technology.

Everybody wants things to be faster and faster, so speed is one thing that probably they can improve.

I have been using it for more than 20 years.

It is very stable; I have not found any issues.

It is scalable; it will meet the company’s needs going forward.

On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, I would say technical support is around five. They’re good.

The upgrades are straightforward. I haven't seen any issues. It has been getting better, especially with these newer versions; especially with 11g and 12c. Of course, with 12c, it's much better.

When I select working with a vendor such as Oracle, they have to be reliable, with a good reputation. They have to have a good support organization. They have to be cheap, fast and scalable.

The most valuable feature is the searching; it takes less time to search.

The security is also valuable.

Many organizations in my country use Oracle, so it's for us to communicate between our systems and other systems. We don't need, for example, some behind-the-scenes or in-between integration, or some other integration program.

I have a problem with Windows. It doesn't work so well; it's difficult. It's not as easy as SQL Server. For example, if I want to publish, or if I want my clients to work with Oracle database, I need to install Oracle clients. It's annoying. It's for security.

Sometimes I have difficulty with its Arabic support. It doesn't work so well in Arabic, in all of the versions we use. We need to go to the Analyze link to choose Arabic.

It goes down sometimes; sometimes it is not as stable. It is 90% stable, 10% unstable.

It is scalable; it is better.

We have not used technical support.

Sometimes when we run into difficulties, I have found some answers by searching on the web.

Other teams perform the initial setup. It goes smoothly but we do have problems, as I’ve mentioned; sometimes we have difficulty with Windows. We need to install it many times. Sometimes, we need to reformat the PCs, and reinstall Windows.

Determine how the Oracle database will be used in your organization. For example, if you want to build a new system, and you want your system to connect with another system, to another organization, you must use Oracle, because the other organization uses Oracle, and it is easy to communicate with it.

For both versions:

• Oracle data miner: automation of created and tested several models
• Warehouse builder: the best data modeling implementation tools for multi-dimensional schema, spatial data, robust ETL implementation
• Fusion middleware: information systems integration and process management
• Data integrator: bulk movement; good connectivity to the other databases, even hierarchical databases; simplicity in ETL implementation
• WebLogic: JDeveloper bundling as a new feature
• BI publisher: showing the best images of data and resources with quality reports, managing the reports, robust report designer
• Application development framework: rapid training and development, excellent deployment, simplicity, map integration

The product has improved organizations by developing BI applications for banks such as a banking data warehouse, fraud detection, incident detection, ad-hoc BI reports shown on maps with drill-down features, data quality process and ETL.

We are hoping they make improvements in the following areas

• Data mining
• Big data analytics

Because we need to find economic models and buying behavior by improving the data mining process and integration with structured and unstructured data for accurate analysis and effective decision-making.

I regularly encounter stability issues.

I regularly encounter scalability issues.

I rate technical support 9/10.

Our first solution was Microsoft’s solution. We switched to Oracle because of data volume, switch to big data in the future, security and other features.

Initial setup was complex. There was a limitation regarding access to the product, because of sanctions on Iran.

We also evaluated Pentaho, Talend, and Microsoft’s solution.

Make your best estimate regarding project size and data volume. Fully understand all of the products available.

Active Data Guard: This feature is useful for all organizations, I believe, as it provides you the comfort of routing your reporting requirements to a standby site while at the same time redo application is done.

Tablespace Encryption: This feature helps in protecting your data whenever you share it. It prevents unrestricted access to data, no matter whether you are DBA or OS guy.

Data Masking: This feature helps in hiding the confidential information from unauthorized users, such as customer phone#, email, account balance, credit card#, etc.

Database Replay

Active Data Guard has been pretty handy in managing the real-time reporting requirements from our core systems. Tablespace Encryption has also been very helpful in implementing security to ensure that our data is secured.

Data Guard: We face issues while configuring standby sites using Data Guard. The error messages reported do not match with the actual reason for failure. So, proper error logging should be developed so that users can reach the exact root cause.

I have used it for five years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I rate customer service 6.5/10.

I rate technical support 6.5/10. The reason for such a low rating is that we are located in Asia and whenever we open a SR during daytime, it is routed to an Indian engineer who doesn't provide a lot of support. However, when I open a SR during nighttime, we are assigned some American engineer who helps in resolving the issue pretty promptly. So I think Oracle needs to look into this. It’s my opinion only.

We have been using Oracle from day one.

Installation is pretty simple and user friendly.

In-house implementation.

That’s pretty much financial stuff myself being a DBA can't answer. However, when Oracle is keeping things up and running, then ROI would be good.

License cost for Oracle Database and other products seems to be on the higher side, but even then, more than half of the market is captured by Oracle.

We evaluated MS SQL Server.

Just go for it and explore its features. You will find a pretty easy way to manage your routine tasks.

The most valuable feature of the product for me is the Oracle MTA (Multitenant Architecture) because it can reduce dramatically the operating costs. And, it could lead to license cost savings depending on the aggregation of DBs.

First is operating cost down. There is a lot administrative work, even if there is only one DB, such as backup, tuning, monitoring and patching. DB Integration with MTA contributes to reducing operating costs. Using Oracle MTA, we can operate above actions to multiple database with just one operation. So we can reduce operating cost.

Second is license cost down. With Oracle MTA, we can reduce license cost. Because we can integrate MTA server(s) from a lot of Oracle servers.

Using MTA, the development environment can be easily prepared. Efficient maintenance such as patching and backup to multiple environments can be carried out in a single operation. Also it can be easily migrated to the cloud environment.

In the same user, it is suitable in the test and development environment. And it is also suitable for databases with large numbers of environments.

I have used this solution for over 13 years of pre-sales activities as engineer of Oracle products in the company-wide organization. Recently, I'm in charge of DB security, DB In-Memory, Multitenant and Oracle Cloud.

I did encounter issues with stability. But it was the first release (12.1.0.1). Now, MTA is quite stable at the latest version.

We didn't encounter any issues with scalability. We can use MTA and RAC (Real Application Clusters) in combination, so it can also meet scalability requirements.

Previously, instance consolidation and schema integration was the mainstream. However, instance consolidation can consume a lot of resources, and schema consolidation entails a cost for application modification. MTA has resolved these challenges.

Although the setup itself is not significantly different, we needed a little consideration to configure multitenant designs, such as security settings and operation design.

High DB consolidation ratio leads to reduced license costs, regardless of the Enterprise Edition and Oracle multitenant option license. In addition, running costs should be considered.

There is a lot administrative work, even if there is only one DB, such as backup, tuning, monitoring and patching. DB Integration with MTA contributes to reducing operating costs.

We did not evaluate other options, because there are no other options. Oracle Multitenant is the only option.

The current optimal use case is test and development environment. If you would like to use MTA in advance, you can check it out on Oracle Cloud (PaaS). Because Oracle Cloud can be used as a prepaid system, you can try a variety of optional features without caring about the license costs.

Oracle Database is the industry standard product for a long time. This has been achieved precisely they provide what the customers really want in every new version.

We like and appreciate the fact that Database is the industry standard for RDBMS solutions. Because of this, we know that the product is constantly being developed and improved in terms of functionalities and stability. It's very stable and a very secure place to store data.

We know that it's an investment that gives us peace of mind. It's mature and has a broad community of users.

There are a lot of features that I'm just not sure of yet in their ability to provide us value. I'd like to try a rack implementation and a replication-type software, though I'm not sure of their ability to add value. A more specific area of improvement, would be in technical support. It needs to be better, especially for Oracle's flagship product.

I've been working with it since the 90s, going back to 733.

We don't have any issues deploying it.

We haven't had any issues with crashing or downtimes or anything due to the product. It's been very stable, and there's not really even a thought of it being unstable.

Some of our bigger projects that are non-E-Business Suite, like SAP implementations, go up to five terabyte databases and there no problems scaling there. We've had no issues with inability to scale.

Technical support is definitely challenging as they are not always the most forthcoming with information, nor are they the most highly-trained techs when you open SRs. There have definitely been issues there, especially compared to the costs that you pay for the support.

There's always room for improvement, but we're happy overall.