Oracle Database Reviews

The best thing about Oracle Database is its being a relational database. There is no other database that can meet the benefits it provides. The data retrieval and access are the main keys, the best features within Oracle.

I'm a technical guy so how I look at data is, it needs to be accessed quickly, preserved safe and secure. Basically, the product should give you peace of mind within the corporation. There shouldn't be any worries as such.

It facilitates a lot of security benefits.

The only major thing that we see right now is the downtime. Whenever there is an upgrade, whenever there is planned, scheduled maintenance, the downtime could be a huge impact for the business itself. That is where other companies are trying to compete, in terms of providing solutions, to avoid the downtime or minimize it.

There aren't really stability issues. Oracle does have a physical real application cluster, RAC. It does minimize the downtime.

It's absolutely scalable. The 12c version is way more scalable than how it was in the 11g version. It does solve that problem.

I'm the one who resolves the tickets. We don't use tech support.

I'm pretty new to working here at PayPal. But they have had Oracle for so many years. And so many companies that I've worked for in the past, like Best Buy, Cargill, Cisco, all these companies have Oracle at a very large scale.

Even though it is really expensive compared to other databases, like SQL and other non-SQL databases out there, Oracle has been like a monopoly. They are very high, premium. Still, consumers want to use it because it meets customers' needs. 

It's pretty simple to use. You pretty much find all the technical stuff online even if you are a newbie, for you to get up to speed. It just takes your willingness to learn and understand it.

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.

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.

From a storage and memory perspective, 11g is great. We also tried to install 12c on our machines, but we weren't happy about it because there were two version of it and we weren't ready to use the required plugins. We'll go to 12c next year, but I'd like to know whether we can go straight to 13c, which is already out.

11g has helped increase the performance of our database. We're also able to maintain it easier and better.

It's really not very user-friendly. Once installed and set up, there are still a lot of other steps we've had to take to get it functioning the way we want and need it to.

Deploying it required a lot of customization steps.

The stability is better than with 10g, in our experience with it.

The scalability is OK, but now that we're pushing 30GB of data per hour, there are problems with applications at the OIS level not handling the data correctly.

I performed the full setup myself but winged the rest. I had problems with the patches even though the upgrade installation went well. I spoke with DBA's in other companies and they had no problems with the patches. I still haven't come up with a solution.

It's a good product, better than older versions.

For me as a DBA, the most important features are the partitioning option, active data guard, and security options. All of these are very useful for my daily workflow.

Oracle Database is the core of our enterprise information system, which I maintain.

I think Oracle 12c has a lot of new functionality that has never been in the previous versions I work with, 8i to 11g, for example, master-slave architecture where you can plug and run multiple databases from a single master database as well as the ability to create a container database (CDB) that contains all the Oracle-level data and data dictionary.

I have used it since 2000, so more than 15 years.

All the issues I dealt with during deployment have been related to other applications and not the Database itself. All of the issues were fixed by programmers during the deployment and test implementation phases.

All the issues I dealt with in regards to instability have been related to other applications and not the Database itself. All of the issues were fixed by programmers during the deployment and test implementation phases.

All the issues I dealt with in scaling it have been related to other applications and not the Database itself. All of the issues were fixed by programmers during the deployment and test implementation phases.

Oracle has an excellent knowledge base and, using this, I fixed over 90% of issues myself.

I have experience with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2012, but my main activity is Oracle RDBMS.

Initial setup steps are very straightforward and clearly set out in the documentation.

I have experience with implementation both through a vendor team and in-house. I would strongly recommend to have a very clear understanding of how an applied system works because the most issues you will have to deal with are with the applied logic, and not with the Database itself.

It depends on applied information system and what kind of RDBMS features and options have been used by your development team or by the vendor.

If you want to have a high-performing, stable, secure, and scalable system, you will choose Oracle Database.

In our business, we deal with vast amounts of financial data. We need to be able to capture all of it accurately without any downtime. We're able to do that with ODB because it gives us 99% uptime while reliably capturing all the data that's important to our business.

The look and feel of it needs improvement. It looks and feels the same throughout, but there are times when we want or need a different instance to have a different look and feel. In other words, it would be nice to be able to customize it to better suit our needs.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's very good, very stable. We're in our own ODB shop, and so far we haven't seen any issues with instability.

It is very good, very stable. We are in our own Database shop, and so far we haven't seen any issues.

We can scale it, and we are currently exploring cloud options.

We are always in touch with Oracle support, so we create cases with them often. They are very good and very consistent across all our Oracle products at every location. Technical support is centralized so we know we'll get good, consistent service from the reps.

It's very easy and straightforward to set up.

We implemented it in-house because it was so easy.

We are actually exploring other products like GoldenGate. We believe this product will give us our next big break. We're also looking into Cloud Control 13c.

The key and most valuable feature of any database solution is its stability. In our experience, Oracle Database is highly stable, which is the best part of it. It's certainly much more stable than Microsoft SQL Server.

The biggest improvement to our organization is that with ODB's stability, it gives us back our time and attention to deal with more pressing issues. We know that we have ready access to our data with ODB, and that it can be relied on.

Although ODB is stable and reliable, to make stable and reliable it has to be carefully planned because it's complicated. You really have to know how Oracle works in order to not make mistakes that compromises the DB's functioning. You have to know what you're doing and you should make sure your entire team is familiar with the documentation.

We've had no issues deploying it. Again, you have to be careful, though, because it's complicated.

Stability is a 5 out of 5. Again, ODB's stability is its best and most important feature for us.

Scalability is a 5 out of 5. We've been able to scale it for our needs.

Technical support isn't perfect. I give them a 4 out of 5.

I found setup to be complicated depending on how it's to be used. For us, it was complicated but we knew what we were doing.

There's a lot more to Oracle, and it's not as simple as you think. It's not like anybody can go and install it because you need to know what you're doing. As a team, you have to go through all the proper documentation.

From a business stand point, the ability to go to market, compliance and business enabling is what matters most. Oracle database has rich functionalities that helped us design a system that meets our business' changing needs. However I was responsible for maintaining service levels. My focus was on how to provide consistent response time and the throughput amidst changing business needs and growing data. Oracle database offers one of the industry's best diagnostic infrastructure that enables expert DBA to know exactly how system behaves under different workload, thus able to proactively prevent any performance bottlenecks or quickly respond to exceptional situation or even be able to predict future performance.

Databases are usually unknown to business users. The business users draw value by using the system to operate the business processes and making the decision at various stages. Businesses do not expect exceptions in their daily routine from a computerized system. Having said that, consistently performing systems enables businesses to serve the customer in consistent manner.

Today we do lots of database consolidations, which means multiple applications reside in the same physical databases using one or more schema. I would like to see some seamless feature to simply drag and drop all the objects belong to one application from one database to another database.

I have used Oracle database releases from 8i to 11g since 2001. We used it primarily as a database component of Oracle Application 11i. Subsequently we continue to expand the usage to many new application systems including business intelligence and B2B applications.

Oracle databases are the most reliable, accompanied by good documentation and support. We never encountered an issue during the deployment which was due to a product issue.

Any system goes through a phase of stabilizing which takes a fair amount of time. Fortunately, with Oracle database, this time has reduced significantly.

Not in our line of business.

Since 2001, I have enjoyed reliable service from Oracle Support.

We always used Oracle Database. We also have SQL Server databases serving many small-medium scale applications. And they perform better as well. In my experience, SQL server databases offers stable database environment. It is easy to use and quick to learn for new DBAs with same windows UI.

Initial setup was certainly complex, specifically from the application standpoint. We had deployed many new modules that Oracle Application 11i offered in their version 11.5.4. These products had significant impact on database performance. There were also many customizations in the application system. It took us almost 6 months to establish consistently performing system environment.

In Singapore we implemented through Oracle Consulting. They are one of the best in the industry with a huge amount of dedication.

Oracle database is one of the best database systems with largest population of experts around helping the global communities. Hence the knowledgebase is rich and vast. However, workout a strong business case in order to get it approved by the sponsor. As a technology expert, IT function needs clear strategy while selecting one product over another.