Oracle Database Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature of Database is the reliability that we get from it. We really depend on it being up and available because we're a manufacturing company. It's got four 9's of uptime, and that's incredibly important.

It goes back to the reliability factor with Database. We've been an Oracle Database customer for years and years, through PeopleSoft, through EBS and other products that we have that use the database. It's pretty straightforward, it's easy to manage, and there's pretty good support for it. All of these things are of vital importance to our business.

We'd like to get some more add-ons, such as Database Vault for security. Other than that, I'd say that support has been harder and harder to get. I can remember 14 years ago, working with Oracle support, talking to the analyst on the phone, and they would sit there and work with you until the problem is resolved. Now, we spent a lot of our time and effort and wheels trying to work with support and get handed off to the next analyst and you start from scratch. We lose a lot of time. A lot of times we just have to escalate it up, without really giving it enough time. I don't know if the level-one folks are just searching through the knowledge base, like we can, online. So the biggest problem has probably been Oracle support.

I came on board at this company in 2003. We've had Oracle Database in place since at least that time. I believe they were on 7.3 when I first started. We don't really use a lot of the features that are available in there as we're just a pretty vanilla type of operation. There are a bunch of features that we would like to use, but we just don't or we're not licensed to use them. The features we'd like to use are the compression and the encryption.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had nothing but good stability around Database.

We sized our database well for what our expected transactions were going to be. We never had to scale it up. Of course, you add space to it over time. We have done that with nothing that causes any issues.

I thought that the upgrades were fairly easy. I've done a few and it's fairly spelled out as there is a lot of knowledge base around out there. If you do run into problems, which I found going from 7 to 8 to 9 to 10 to 11, the fixes have been fairly easy. I expect going from 11 to 12 that they will be easy as well.

It's one of the more expensive database products. From a business perspective, we try to leverage our whole entire Oracle footprint to drive down the pricing. Instead of your list price that you see on the web for Database, for example, we can work with ourselves from Oracle and we can make a bigger purchase of more products at a reduced rate. We get the Cadillac for the non-Cadillac price.

You have to have a good plan of what you want to do, what your business is going to need. Are you going to need a Cadillac RDBS software system -- Oracle? Can you do it with one that isn't a standard versus Oracle Enterprise Edition? Stuff like that. Be sure that you know what your requirements are. Be able to look into the future and see what they are going to be in three, four, or five years hence.

I really like the way Oracle Database handles crash recovery. I find that that's the most valuable feature among the other databases that I work with. I have yet to see a time when my database crashed, for whatever reason, whether it be node crash or server crash, and Oracle didn't clean it up and it come back online as before. The way Oracle processes cleanup itself and comes back online is great. If one of the Oracle nodes in the cluster goes down, the others keep running, which we're very happy about.

It's a good, solid database architecture, one of the best in the industry. With it, we also have a good partnership with Oracle, who provides us with great support.

It's so huge, so vast. If we're talking about security, there could be improvements. Also, we'd like to be able to come up with migration strategies that involve less downtime. That's one of our struggles with it, particularly when we're migrating sizes of several terabytes. We can't afford to have our agents down for twelve hours at a time to do the migrations. So I'd like to see some more innovative ideas, some more improvements in that area to help us out.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

It's very stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We've been using the add-node functionality. We started with a few of the clusters, the RAC cluster, with two nodes, and we have expanded them to five. We are going to what we call the super-cluster design.

The initial setup is intuitive, though I can't say it's necessarily easy. It's just that I've been doing it for several years now.

We do implementations with our in-house team.

I think Oracle is the way to go. It's a solid RDBMS. There's lots to learn.

We use most of our projects with the government and private sector based on Microsoft SQL Server.

We have an e-correspondence solution leveraging both Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases. This solution utilizes Java on top of IBM cloud technology for business automation, ensuring security through Oracle and Microsoft Secure integration.

Many companies are transitioning from AME to Oracle Database due to competitive pricing. This shift is straightforward. Cost is a priority; they are trying to secure market share and ensure robust security measures.

The solution could be cheaper.

The product is much more stable than Microsoft.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. 1,000 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

Oracle Database offers rigidity and top performance.

The product is expensive.

Oracle Database is the best based on stability and high performance.

I recommend this solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We are using it to store information. We are using Oracle Database 12.

It is stable, and its performance is good. Its interface is also fine.

Its security is good, but it could be more secure.

I have been using Oracle Database for two to three years.

It is stable.

We have a lot of users at the moment. We have a couple of hundred users because it is used by different teams. We are, for sure, going to increase its usage.

Their support is very good.

We have been using Oracle Database for a long time. We didn't use anything else previously.

It is straightforward. We have no problems with it. It takes three to four hours.

We implemented it in-house.

It has an annual subscription. It is an Oracle product, so it is a bit expensive, but that's fine. 

I would recommend this product to others. We have already been using it for a long time, and we have no need to move to another product. It is very good.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10.

The solution is primarily used as a relational database, or we can use it for certain kinds of AP integrations.

The performance is much better than the Microsoft SQL in some ways. The stability has been good so far. It's reliable. 

The pricing needs to be improved. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

There are only certain people who use the solution. Not many users have access to much of it. We only have real access to some of the databases. I would say there are only one to five of us who can access Oracle at the moment.

I've never spoken to technical support. Therefore, I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I'm also familiar with Microsoft SQL. However, we do not currently use anything else as a relational database at this time. 

While I can still query the database and then access it, I was never involved in deployment or installation.

The pricing could be better. It would be nice if they could offer a one-year subscription package or something similar. 

I cannot speak to which version of the solution we're using at this time. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I've been pretty happy with its capabilities overall. 

I would recommend the solution to others. If you look at the progress being made in Oracle, they are coming up with and bringing up some new features. It sounds good. They are more into the cloud now, too, and getting into new features and stuff like that there. They're improving constantly.

RDBMS, we still believe, is Oracle's core product. Hence any time we are looking at any database features or building a new database, Oracle is always our product of choice because of its stability, scalability, reliability, and flexibility.

It would be the stability that's improved our organization the most. We are a 24/7 manufacturing plant. We take one day off a year, Christmas Day. Other than that, we're building and creating drugs and the stability of the Oracle database enables us to have near 100% uptime 24/7/364.

It's so expensive, particularly Enterprise Edition, and that would be my number one gripe. It's very, very expensive. Also, Oracle makes a big show of its new features and enhancers with each new release, but it's very rare that any of those enhancements come with Database by default. You have to pay for each of those enhancement -- and pay heavily at that.

In the latter versions of the 12c product, I've actually found it a little bit more difficult to set up than it was before. I find that Oracle is introducing many, many, many new features with each part of the database. Sometimes I think they're losing focus of the core components and what customers actually need. I think if they concentrated on the core elements of RDMS, which, for me, is their number one product, I think before going on the periphery and looking at small enhancements or additions to the product, they should look into making it even more stable before they do these major releases.

It's been very stable for us.

I would say the scalability sets it apart from others. We run a big manufacturing plant and the database is growing at a very very, high rate, but we know with the Oracle RDBMS, it can sustain growth from now and into the future.

I actually found that the earlier versions of RDBMS were actually easier to set up, so I've been working with the Oracle product right from Oracle 7, and I obviously will in 12c. I find now in 12c, I would expected laying out Oracle Database to become easier, but I actually think it's a little bit more complicated now in these later versions. I can categorically say that the joining up with the Oracle agent between RDBMS and Oracle Enterprise Manager is an extremely complicated process. When we were on TNG before we'd done any upgrades, the agent to get the database to talk to Enterprise Manager was a really, really simple thing to do. In fact, right now it's extremely complicated.

For installing the database or looking at the database, I would say look at the components that you need within the database. What we generally find is that most of the features that we want, or most of the features that are available in Enterprise Edition, we actually wouldn't use, so take time and you might actually see them only by using Standard Edition.

Oracle is the premier relational database platform for enterprise environments. Any organization that purchases enterprise applications will likely have Oracle in place since so many applications require or prefer it.

The most valuable features of Oracle database from my perspective are:

• Read consistency (all queries see a read consistent view of the database so that readers do not block writers and vice versa).
• Data Guard: standby database, with options for maximum performance, availability and protection. I use it in full-synchronous mode to ensure a “hot standby” is available with zero data loss.
• Ability to run non-Windows OS, particularly Linux.
• Ability to monitor and tune; lots of instrumentation built in.

Oracle Database is a big, complex technology stack with many options, features, management packs, etc. The base product (Oracle Database Enterprise Edition) is generally rock solid. Some of the oldest, most mature options are also quite reliable (example: Partitioning option). However, most of the other optional products create additional issues. Almost every time I have pursued the implementation of an optional feature I have encountered bugs, limitations or other unexpected behavior.

I would like to see Oracle follow a model like Microsoft’s SQL Server Enterprise Edition, where all products and features are included by default. There are no “options” you can purchase with SQL Server EE. It seems like one of the results of Oracle’s plethora of optional offerings is confusion and quality issues.

I've been using Database for over 20 years. There are many additional options and management packs (examples: Partitioning, Tuning Pack, Diagnostics Pack, Lifecycle Management Pack, Active Data Guard, Advanced Compression, Advanced Security, RAC, etc.).

A “simple” deployment of just Oracle Database Enterprise Edition is generally a trouble-free activity, albeit still tedious. The RDBMS kernel is perhaps the most mature on the market (Oracle and IBM’s DB2 were released about the same time).

It is one of the most stable solutions on the market.

There are no issues with scaling it.

Technical support is very good. I don’t use Oracle Support often to open a new case. Questions and issues I have are most often answered via the support portal. On the rare occasion a new service request is opened, I find the responses timely and helpful.

In the past, I have used RAC (and before that OPS, its ancestor). In general, like most shared clustering technologies, the “solution” creates more problems than it solves. RAC’s complexity level requires full-time attention in my opinion. I abandoned the option in favor of VMware and virtual servers, which cover availability from a hardware-loss perspective. In cases where more availability is needed, the Data Guard option is sufficient and MUCH simpler to configure and use.

I started with IBM’s DB2 and used SQL Server (Sybase initially, then Microsoft SQL Server after they split in the 90’s) before Oracle, so have used and evaluated all three of the major RDBMS vendors. I no longer use DB2 because the platform it was on (mainframe) was retired, but I still actively use Microsoft SQL Server.

Both products have their place. I prefer SQL Server for the smaller, departmental applications and Microsoft-related back-office applications due to its ease of deployment and management. I prefer Oracle for most enterprise-scale applications due to its overall strength in this area (performance, scalability, availability) and ability to run on a non-Windows OS (we use Linux exclusively).

Oracle is a complex product, there is no way around that. Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, which can be installed with a few mouse clicks, Oracle takes planning, preparation and significantly more time and expertise.

We have always installed, configured, and managed Oracle with in-house personnel. I would not recommend outsourcing the implementation unless all support for the product were being outsourced. Oracle database requires expertise and constant attention. If an organization intends to support it internally, the personnel responsible for that support need to be the same that install and configure it.

Oracle is very expensive. No organization that didn’t “have to” use Oracle would do so. If I were in a small business or an organization that did all of its own applications development, I would avoid Oracle simply due to its cost. Other databases on the market would suffice in those scenarios. Any medium-to-large business will probably not be able to avoid using Oracle database. I don’t think there is an ROI to calculate, but rather a sunk cost in doing business. My advice would be to limit the number of options and features and go with the bare minimum needed to support the needed applications.

The technology behind the base RDBMS is excellent, probably the best on the market, but its cost and complexity are negatives. The personnel who will support need to get formal training and need to be dedicated database administrators. A part-time DBA will not be sufficient for anything more than a trivial deployment.