Oracle Coherence Reviews

• Event driven architecture
• Portable object format
• Live events
• Active - passive replication
• Cache schemes
• Distributed
• Near scheme
• Eviction policies

The improvement on features of Tangosol Coherence during 2006 through 2009 was limited, but the best feature was the standalone. After 2013, integration with Oracle has added many features which have not been used much, or the industry is not ready for the features. It has become very heavy along with the price for Oracle's integrated product as a fusion middleware.

The product has a big miss for troubleshooting, auditing, and monitoring for new features like live events, live objects, etc.

I have used Oracle Coherence for more than 10 years, from version 3.5 through 12.1.2.1.

No.

No, from a product perspective.

Yes, from a license cost perspective.

A six out of 10, as it depends on your relationship with the vendor.

No.

It is costly compared to competitors in the in-memory caching market.

Look for open source with better support on monitoring, auditing, and cloud support.

In order, the most valuable features are:

1. Flexible topology
2. Data affinity
3. Configurability
4. POF (optimized) serialization
5. Support of C++ & Java

We are system integrators. We used Coherence in building a transaction processing system for a client. Introducing a data grid, we moved from a vertically scalable solution to full scalability. The data grid helped a lot to reach the goal of scaling the system in a virtualized environment.

Monitoring and control of the grid was only via JMX interface. Logging was distributed, thus hard to collect and put in order to be able to investigate the issues, eventually. Today's Coherence version has a new logging system and a web-based UI.

I have been using it for 1,5 years.

No stability issues: A node can fail, but the topology can be designed to be fault-tolerant.

Scalability is safe. The data is distributed/replicated. Adding/removing a node only has the cost of re-distributing the partitions of the data across the network.

N.A.

We did not previously use a different solution.

It is very easy to set up a basic topology, but hard to configure and tune to make it really work.

N.A. The client paid a license for the full Oracle stack of products.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options. The client used the full Oracle stack in their architecture.

Before you can master Coherence, you must study how a data grid works. So, start learning about common data grid patterns. The next step is Coherence documentation, which is clear, but huge.

• Query response time
• Clustering, data distribution, data affinity

Coherence has improved response times for queries of sizeable data sets. Also by allowing for data distribution and replication through clustering, it improves the reliability of information systems.

• An API allowing for ‘joins’ between different caches, similar to DB joins.
• A more streamlined configuration. There is a multitude of proxy, node, extended client, etc. scripts and config files that need to be maintained. What about making this less of a hassle in future by bringing more consistency into the configuration process?

I've been using it for three years

We had one instance when we experienced intermittent network failure. This issue was not reproducible for obvious reasons. Coherence failed to live up to its SLA by not being able to recover but getting into a state where new nodes were created when the old ones were still there but for some reason no longer recognized as being part of the cluster. The Oracle support was not something to write home about, i.e. there was a constant request for more info (logs, timelines, etc. – which were provided) and never a feeling that the problem was understood or at least that there was any serious attempt at investigating or reproducing on Oracle’s side.

Medium to Good. Sometimes prompt competent responses, at other times support was lacking.

It was a company decision as this is a commercial product with guarantee of support.

It was complex. There are a multitude of configuration files and shell scripts, most of which could be copy and pasted. No uniformity of approach or tool to allow for proper management of configuration.

ROI is reasonably good, since no cheaper alternative satisfying company requirements was identified.

The product is considered expensive, hence the company will be on the lookout for a replacement if feasible. I'm not involved in licensing discussion.

My advice would be for Oracle to prepare a database with already existing configurations from clients. This would help future clients to have templates for various solutions already instead of reinventing the wheel. Generally Oracle fails at this chapter as opposed to open source solutions. It is very painful to start from scratch with little or no concrete solutions posted online (full solutions with commercial value).

• Memory grid
• Multicast support

It helped us to cache the data in memory and improved performance by 10x.

The cross-site or cross-data center replication seems slow. This can be improved.

We have been using this solution for four years.

We have a stability issue once a year on the average. Most of the time, the cause is a network issue. When a few servers get out of the cluster, we lose data.

There have not really been any scalability issues.

Technical support is OK, but it is not really great.

The installation was pretty easy.

You can go ahead with this product blindly if you are looking for a memory grid kind of solution. The license is there for sure.

In-memory data grid and distributed caching.

It was suited for stock exchange marketing software, improved performance.

Stability.

About 3 years.

Yes, there is a big problem in Coherence cluster. For example, a master, because of connection issues, does not announce its mastery to a slave; slave becomes a master, then two masters appears in cluster, and the whole cluster dies.

No.

Two out of 10. They always look at you innocently and say everything is fine. Only when you send all the core dumps etc. do they start to look into the problem, and it takes from two months to half a year to fix problems.

Yes, I used to use Redis, Aerospike, Cassandra, etc. Why coherence? It was a company decision.

Setup is easy.

Product is too expensive and support is poor. There are better products.

Nope, it was a company decision to use Coherence, and I did not have influence on that decision.

Invest in your network if you use Coherence cluster. Serious!

The most important features to me are its scalability, high availability, and distributed caching mechanism.

We used the distributed caching mechanism to keep the cache up-to-date with the database. Implementation of the Touch processor helped a lot.

They could make the configuration management easier. Failure maintenance could be improved.

We have been using Oracle Coherence for one year.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We received very good technical support.

Before using Oracle Coherence, we tried using Ehcache. We switched because of replication, grid support, and a few other reasons.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation and technical support also helped.

Before we decided to use Oracle Coherence, we tried out Ehcache, but found the Oracle Coherence better suited our product implementation requirements.

Oracle Coherence is a very good product which helps to create internet-scale applications using a high-performance grid.

The most valuable features are the entry processors for their atomic update ability; and the ability to route an event to one specific node in the cluster.

By embedding Coherence and clustering the application, you can eliminate single source of failure problems. 

We use WebLogic as the JMS provider. For technical reasons, we were not successful in clustering it, so we have a single source of failure problem.

I would like to see a more modern API like Hazelcast or Infinispan.

I have used Oracle Coherence for two years.

The product is stable and solid.

We did not try a different solution, but we searched for a solid product with a good reputation in a financial organization.

Initial setup is straightforward, but it takes some time to tune the cache parameters.

We implemented it through an in-house team.

First compare the product to the more open source competitors, like Apache Ignite and Hazelcast.