Oracle Database Reviews

The most valuable feature is how evolved the solution is right now. It's been around for a while, and I think it's been servicing a lot of different use cases. I think it's really stabilized, evolved, and you can actually put it to use in multiple scenarios. It adapts itself just as well to most business use cases.

I think the best part about Oracle is it keeps evolving. It's not adding any more features to it. There's a big move toward custom cloud services - big databases in the cloud - and obviously there are people with apprehensions in terms of what will happen if that data is shared. They are working towards addressing that issue. They are kind of compartmentalized, and kind of made some of the domains private, to maintain the security for certain critical domains. You still have the power of using the cloud. That's the great thing about it: It keeps evolving. It doesn't stay still. It's very compelling.

It also provides reliability, in terms of handling large volumes of data. I don't believe there's another database server that people would pick. Given a choice, everybody would like to go with Oracle.

I think those are the two big features that really stick out.

It has definitely improved the way my organization functions. It's our database management tool. We have a lot of sensitive information. Different business verticals have a lot of sensitive information that they want to reliably preserve somewhere, and also be able to call back upon in a very secure manner. Oracle does just that.

At the same time, it has a lot of the algorithms where it tries to optimize itself in terms of how fast you can get the data out, and also how fast you can write to it as well. I think it's definitely improved and provides benefits to the industry; not just for the gaming industry that I'm part of, but generally for all verticals in the business world. As I’ve mentioned, it’s the database of choice for most business verticals.

I’d like to see them include a certain amount of intuitiveness in the optimization of the queries, and the algorithms for that could be better. There's still room for improvement in those areas.

One of the things that is also mentioned about Oracle is that with the RAC architecture, the storage is shared, and that sometimes becomes contentional. It's not so much the processing on the nodes; it's the data processing that becomes a point of contention sometimes – if they could do something so we can customize the RAC in some way, and also implement sharing, something along the lines of what Perl OOP has, where the storage is also exclusive to the nodes. I'm sure something like that can be brought in. Having mentioned that, I'm pretty sure they're already researching into it. That's something from my experience that can be improved.

I don't think you would pick another database for stability; for financial data, or anything related to money transactions, where you want to reliably store data, and you don't want to lose any data. You don't want to try to save something in the database and then go in the next day and not have it, obviously. Oracle is right up there in terms of stability.

Obviously, the scalability factor was increased with the Oracle Real Application Clusters (RACs). You have multiple instances of Oracle, with the shared storage, so you can spawn multiple processes to do large volume data lifting. You don't want to rely on one instance alone. You don't want to load that one node alone. It can do everything. You can spread it across nodes. The RAC solution gives you that.

In terms of the data scalability itself, if you don't want a shared storage, you have solutions such as Exadata. It provides very good storage and gives you great performance.

In all respects, Oracle on all fronts is doing great, including scalability. I don't see any issues with it right now. As I’ve mentioned, the great thing about the product is that it keeps evolving and tries to improve.

I think it's great to have those features.

Technical support is a little sketchy. It depends on who you get on any particular day. Oracle is a worldwide organization, so I guess there are certain sections that are not really well covered, in terms of building up a knowledgebase, and trying to go back and see how a problem was solved in the past, which should be an easy thing to do.

I think sometimes it comes down to doing that: going back, looking at the issue you are reporting, determining whether you've faced it before, and what the solution was. If there isn't a solution and if this issue hasn't been reported earlier, then be intuitive about it. That part was missing in the few instances where I've had the opportunity to call support.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s a worldwide organization. They're available around the clock, covering different time zones. All those aspects are covered. I think a little more intuitiveness in the solutioning for the support issues would go a long way in improving the experience.

We previously used plenty of solutions. Oracle was an easy choice. If cost is not a constraint, I would recommend Oracle ten times out of ten.

Setup is never straightforward. It's a pretty complex piece. I have actually overseen it, but it's mainly the database administrators, the DBAs, who actually worked on it. They do come back and work closely with us architects and engineers, in terms of how to best configure the infrastructure.

I wouldn't say that it is straightforward, but at the same time, it's been done so many times, there are so many use cases to fall back on. I'm pretty sure that if you get stuck somewhere, you will get the knowledge base, go back and get past that issue that you're facing at that moment.

It's all down to being so evolved. Oracle has been around for a while, so you have those benefits.

We moved from another solution, knowing the history of Oracle. We earlier conceptualized to be on Informix. Informix was one of the options we really considered. There wasn't much of innovation happening in Informix. It was more legacy. I think that is a reason why we moved to another database system that is more active with more innovation covering different aspects: scalability, data volume management and those kinds of things. At that point, Informix was definitely the only other option. Subsequently, we looked at other solutions such as MySQL for cost purposes, but having explored each of those, they don't really match up with Oracle for me; the scalability, the data volume management, those features, along with the reliability. There's a lot of hand-holding support that needs to go into those products to be able to match what Oracle offers.

In terms of data security and reliability, if that is of paramount importance, I would definitely suggest Oracle. If cost becomes a factor, in terms of the licensing models I’ve mentioned, then probably I would recommend a cheaper solution - maybe even open source - but that comes with a tradeoff of the data not being reliable.

For financial institutions, financial organizations, you would not want to put your data at risk. I think it's tradeoff with those aspects when making your choice.

The most important criteria when I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle are the support and licensing. I look at the licensing model, in terms of whether there are certain things that they can do to support a company like ours, who've been engaging with them for so long. We have different business models. If they can offer some licensing options that would be more attractive to meet those business models, maybe offer some innovative solutions, that's something that I would look for.

In terms of the support aspects I’ve already mentioned, there are specific business use cases we're trying to solve, and not just rely on the knowledge base that's already accumulated.

Those are some of the things I look for.

Especially with Oracle, you have the high availability features. That specifically is very interesting to customers. When it comes to DR, I don't use high availability. Nonetheless, according to different strategies, it also provides features such as recovery, not the same as production, in different formats. That's a good feature about Oracle.

I provide disaster recovery services; they should look at how to recover production systems during disaster recovery. They are not focusing on that. They don't do that.

I’m in this industry doing recoveries. I don’t see an feature to easily recover all of the databases, especially RAC systems. That’s where they could come up with some kind of snapshots or technology that would make recovery easy.

The stability is completely amazing. It's been the industry standard for many years, so it is very stable.

As far as scalability, we can go from two nodes to I don't know, maybe 256 nodes. We can scale out, scale up and so on.

Technical support used to be not that great, but they are changing. They used to follow the Sun model. They are changing; it's better now.

They have developed automated systems. You don’t do anything. Basically, you turn it on and it brings up all of your stuff. It's easy to use.

When they look at databases, I don't think people look at any other vendors. You have only Microsoft and IBM DB2, but they are not that good. No one goes with them now.

I think when it comes to the product, the mindset is switching. Oracle is like a legacy RDBMS. People are switching to open systems. We have all of the new SQL databases, with no license costs. Especially if you also look at cloud solutions, that's where I think you need to have NoSQL or the latest technologies. That’s where they need to focus.

I'm not an end user of Oracle. We don't run any products on it. We have thousands of customers, and they come to us for disaster recovery. That's our business. We use all of the database solutions. In a previous life, I was an Oracle DBA, and I know what it can be used for. It can store large amounts of data. You can do all sorts of RDBMS data features and it’s the industry standard; there is no other database that can compare to Oracle.

When I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle, I look at the licensing; other costs; and the help from technical support and even from sales. Sales people say yes to everything, except when it comes to implementation. It shouldn’t be that way.

I can't think of any specific features that are the most valuable, but all the small things that Oracle does compared to the free alternatives, such as MySQL, are valuable. I do appreciate having that power to do it. Even though 90% percent of the time I don't use those features, it's nice to have them should I need them.

It actually kind of fractured our organization. Half of us use Oracle for some things and the other half use MySQL for the other. I really don't care; I use both. We use Oracle a lot for authentication. I can't think of anything specific that is all that great about it. I'm not bashing Oracle, I just can't think of anything. I can't think of anything that makes me think, “Oh, we have to have it.”

I can't think of any but I know my manager was unhappy with certain features that we use, but we had to pay for those features along with a bunch of other ones that we didn't use. He wanted an option to not bundle a lot of the features. Other than that, I don't know the specifics about what he was talking about.

It's got a lot of good features, but at the same time sometimes certain niche things aren't mentioned. Some things break and I don't know why. Then when I Google it, there are thousands of reasons why they break, so it takes me a while to really pinpoint why. Its optimization could be improved a little bit, but it's good for the most part.

It's very stable, we've had no problems with that.

For the most part, as long as you do your research and don't screw up your table structures, I don't have any scalability problems.

I haven't used technical support; every issue I've run into I've been able to Google it and figure it out. I haven't had to call in or anything.

I believe we used MySQL for a while, it was free and that was the only reason we were using it. It wasn't the most stable, it was a little slow, and it doesn't scale as well, so we decided to go with a more professional solution.

I don't know why we chose Oracle, but I know we were debating between Oracle, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL. For whatever reason, I'm not sure why my manager went with Oracle, but we did.

Take cost into consideration and pick whichever really suits your needs. Every single database has its strong and weak points. I wouldn't say it's an end-all, be-all solution, but it just happens to work for us.

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.