Oracle Database Reviews

The flash drive recovery feature is the most valuable aspect of ODB for us. There have been many instances when a user mistakenly deletes important files from their flash drive and ODB has been able to recover that data.

The biggest area of improvement that I can suggest is with the stability. I've been using ODB for a while now, and there are have been occasional instances of bugs, glitches, and hiccups. It's never anything major, but they have been annoying. Yes, it's improved over time, but there always seems to be something that has to be fixed.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It hasn't been 100% stable, but I think over time it has become more stable than previously.

It has scalability. We haven't had any issues with being unable to scale it.

In our experience, the level of technical support has been in the middle. There are times when they're really good, and there are times when we've had to solve issues ourselves.

We didn't use a previous solution. It's always been our database product.

Although I don't do setups anymore myself, I found it very easy and straightforward.

We didn't look at other options. It was the first database solution we used.

It has evolved pretty well generally. There are consistently new features and Oracle is making ODB more useful.

Its big advantage is from a market perspective. Over 70% of the market uses Oracle Database. It's the market leader in the mid-tier for relational databases, probably, I think, tied with IBM right now.

The support level is good and well-documented. I can go to the web and I can Google just about any problem I have.

And another reason we use Oracle is that it's going to stay in business for a long time. So it's worth investing in training in the software long-term for us as opposed to, say a, smaller open source product that comes and goes.

It's very easy to get training and resources. Because we use a Linux operating system, our preference is for Oracle. It has a full suite of products and they all play nicely with each other. So if I get something from Oracle, I'm pretty sure it's going to work on my Oracle Database.

I'd like them to expand their support for Oracle Spatial and Graph, an app for Oracle Database. It only supports a single node right now. And really, to be practical, you want something with multiple nodes.

Also, while Oracle does have a NoSQL database (called Oracle NoSQL, a version of Berkley NoSQL, which isn't widely used as far as I can tell), I'd like to have the ability to do a heterogeneous join between my Oracle Relational Database and my NoSQL database, and I'd like to be able to use SQL on my NoSQL.

I've been using it since the 1980s. We use it alongside the Fusion suite, some of the big products there. We use ADF, which is the Java framework that they provide. And we make extensive use of PL/SQL-based products. Traditionally, we used a lot of Forms, but that's being phased out. Now we're using a lot of APEX.

It's pretty easy to install and deploy.

It's very stable. It's a well-known product and, while it does have problems, they're all well-documented. There are traditional security patches and, sometimes, some problems with new functionality. As long as you apply your patches regularly, they're resolved. And Oracle Support Group does resolve them.

We've had no issues with scalability.

The level of technical support is good, but you can put in a TAR and sometimes it will just disappear in space. The challenge for the support often is that if you don't use a straight Oracle configuration, in particular if you use a virtual server, they won't won't guarantee the support because they can't support every possible configuration. However, it doesn't mean that if you have a problem, they won't try to answer it.

It's pretty easy to install. The installation process has improved remarkably since the 80's when I started working with it. It wasn't friendly then, but it's very easy for me now. You just push a couple buttons and move through. If you know what you're doing, you can do it with defaults set up on a basic Oracle Database.

Now if you want to do something a little more complex, like Grid or clustering, you need to take some specialized training.

I implemented it myself.

You're always going to find some product that's cheaper. Oracle is never cheap. You're always going to find some product that is, in certain configurations, faster.

Especially for government organizations, it would always be my first pick.

It is for my personal use. I am using it for implementing data loss prevention (DLP), for which Oracle Database had to be installed first. I didn't use it for any other product.

Its performance is good. It is also stable and scalable.

Its administration side is very difficult. To install Oracle Database, you need to have some prior knowledge. You must learn their commands. I was new to this, so I found some difficulty in it. Its installation should be easier. 

It is expensive, and it should be cheaper.

I have been using this solution for around six months.

It is stable.

It is scalable. I will continue to use it because it is required for implementing DLP.

I haven't used their technical support.

I installed SQL Server.

You need to have prior knowledge to install Oracle Database. The deployment took three to four hours.

I installed it myself.

It is very expensive. Oracle licenses are expensive.

I would recommend it if it is necessary, but you need to have the budget to purchase it.

I would rate Oracle Database a six out of ten.

We use the solution to store all of our application's data in the database. 

The queries performance could improve compared to other products.

I have been using the solution for over 15 years, almost 20 years.

It is a stable product. In terms of recovery, if there is a failure or some kind of fault, we can recover the data. We do not lose it.

The scalability is depending on your infrastructure, if you have the hardware then you can expand it, it is all configurable. Our whole database house is running it and it has been fine.

I have used Aruba previously which was faster at processing queries.

I would recommend this product.

I rate Oracle Database a seven out of ten.

We mainly use the Oracle Enterprise Edition, and in the first days of 2021, we will be installing Oracle Exadata cloud for our customers.

The most valuable features are stability, its backup and recovery, and its performance.

I am not very satisfied with the support at times. You don't always get the support at the time you want and need it.

The price could be better. 

My experience has been perfect, but there is always room for improvement for everything.

I have been working with this solution for more than 20 years.

When I first started I was a developer, now I work as a database administrator, consultant, and integrator.

This solution is very stable,

Stability is one of its main advantages. 

I would rate the stability of this solution an eight out of ten.

In terms of scalability, it's a very powerful tool.

If you are using real application clusters, now after many years, it's very easy to expand your environment.

When you compare it to scaling 10 years ago, it's much easier now to expand the environment.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

Now after many years it's straightforward.

With the many different environments, it can get complicated at times.

When there are too many operations systems with too many hardware platforms, such as HP-UX, Solaris, UNIX, and Windows.

It's common at times to have some issues, but it's not something that can't be resolved.

It's not cheap, but sometimes, you get what you pay for. 

It's expensive.

Depending on the budget and the device, I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it. 

If you have the money, then you should invest in this product, because you can't compare it with anything else on the market as far as a database is concerned.

I would rate Oracle Database a nine out of ten.

The powerful SQL language for working with, analyzing and manipulating lots of data. The concurrency and consistency model that allows many simultaneous users with little or no locking. The extensibility using PL/SQL and Java to extend legacy application with modern features like webservices via the database.

Rewriting legacy procedural modules to SQL with analytic functions has on several occasions turned multi-hour jobs into few-minute jobs. High concurrency enables sales persons in shops to service customers swiftly with no waiting even on peak days with several sales per second. Even though legacy application cannot interface with external services, the database is capable of doing so, which enables the business to get new ideas without thinking of technological hindrances.

There's not much - new features come along in every version helping to keep up with
technological advances. There are some small technical issues such as support forwindowing clause in LISTAGG function and a few similar small issues in SQL. There are a few nice-to-have extensions, like allowing external table syntax on the content of a CLOB.

I've used it since 1996.

Some of the time, a Real Application Cluster version was used, which turned out on very rare occasions to performed unmotivated failover to other node. The problem really was sub-optimal coding of the legacy application in the use of the locking methods of Oracle, which was magnified when propagating locks to other nodes, however would have been nice if RAC could have handled it, even when sup-optimal. After switching some years ago to a single server non-RAC solution, the database has been rock steady - only instabilities was when O/S or hardware failed, not the database.

Highly knowledgeable and competent tech support - once you get past the first level and get the case assigned to the right people. However, it can take quite a bit of time to explain details to first level support and gather debug and log information, that in some cases aren't necessarily relevant but is merely correct procedure in order to get the case assigned. On the other hand, many key Oracle people engage in the community, so a finicky question about a PL/SQL detail might get attention and answers from product managers themselves.

Before 1996 we used a legacy application, but it would locked on a table level. That meant practically no concurrency, for example phone sales people could not enter order data while talking to the customer but wrote on paper. Then one guy would enter all orders later. After a demonstration of Oracle database giving high concurrency, it was very easy for my boss to decide to buy Oracle.

An external consultant was hired for the setup and there was no trouble with the database setup. The legacy application needed a bit extra setting up to get it to run properly with Oracle, but that was not the fault of Oracle.

Bargain with the sales representative for good discounts - particularly if you buy several licences at once. But beware when buying multiple licenses together you get them on a single CSI, which may give trouble in future if you need to cancel one license out of the total, as that in principle means cancelling all licences and renegotiating so you may get new prices with less discount on the yearly support fees for the licences you have left. Research all the things that actually is possible with the basic licence so you get your value-for-money and only pay for options if you really need them.

There weren't many options at the time. A database supported by the legacy application had to be chosen, and the native legacy database just wasn't up to concurrency demands as described above, so Oracle was the other choice.

Oracle database can do many things that you may think it is necessary to supplement with other products. Look into how you may use all of the features to get value-for-money - then it might turn out in the long run to be cheaper than having to integrate multiple products.

For us, the most valuable features of Database have been its robustness, reliability, and the fact that it's highly tuneable.

It also allows us to support large applications and to also tune them properly. Database really provides us with great performance and stability.

I really wish that Oracle had included pluggable databases in the 12c Enterprise Edition. I can understand not putting it into the Standard Edition, but it should be included in the Enterprise Edition at no additional cost.

My other gripe is their licensing practices of the database engine. If I run a VMware infrastructure, and a lot of people do, Oracle makes me pay for licenses for the entire farm. It's very expensive and I don't think it's fair that they'd charge for it.

I've been using Oracle Database for twenty-five years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's way better now than it used to be, but, yes, it is very stable. All of our large applications use Database because of its stability.

The scalability of Database is good. I do have to say, however, that SQL Server for the Database engine is better if you want to run a bunch of small databases. My gripe about 12c is that they will make you pay extra for it even if you've already licensed Enterprise Edition. Also, it's not as easy to tune the pluggables because the underlying infrastructure is non-tuneable. Whereas with SQL Server, there's a little more flexibility. I run both engines: my SQL Server databases are for my little stovepipe stuff and my Oracle Database is for my big, enterprise-level stuff.

In my experience, technical support is really good, as well as the knowledge base. With the KB, I'm usually able to find the answers myself. And, Oracle has automated it to the point where it's very intuitive and helpful. I would, however, like to be able to call someone if needed like I used to. I remember having to wait for long period of time, but it's nice to talk to a person who can help.

Cloudera Hadoop provides the scalable data architecture organizations need to manage increasing data volumes, though not the intuitive GUI for business users. Oracle Big Data Discovery (BDD) provides business users the ability to explore and analyze that Hadoop cluster to uncover data of interest.

The scalable data storage of Hadoop is the most critical feature, but without Oracle Big Data Discovery that data is difficult for business users to access without significant IT support. BDD relies on Spark and Hive to function so those are the next most valuable features of Cloudera Hadoop for me.

Using Oracle Endeca Information Discovery has enabled our clients to search and explore unstructured data so they can answer unexpected questions as soon as they come up. This has been a game changer since it dramatically reduces the delay when new data volumes are introduced, or when new business questions are identified and need to be answered.

Hadoop as a big data repository is difficult for non-technical users to access but provides a potential gold mine of data insight. Oracle Big Data Discovery's ability to let business users explore that large volume of data gives them a significant advantage.

Oracle Big Data Discovery allows business users to interact with data in Hadoop and to transform it into a different format on the Hadoop cluster. This proprietary format can sit within the Hadoop cluster, but is not fault tolerant and query load is not distributed using native Hadoop technologies.

The more BDD can leverage those technologies the more robust and responsive it’s analytics will be. The second point is that when users identify and transform data of interest they do so directly, meaning they do not need to wait on IT development. However, the transformations are not especially complex.

Leveraging R at some point as a user drive interface within Oracle Big Data Discovery would allow them to do more advanced data analysis. Currently this depends on Hadoop programming which is not a technical barrier, but is not accessible to business users.

There are some details around BDD's configuration that should be improved as the product is refined. The main technical constraint is that Oracle Big Data Discovery is designed to work with subsets of the data on Hadoop. Although the record numbers can be increased it’s performance is impacted.

This means if you have one billion records in your Hadoop cluster, you might still only ingest a few million for analysis at a time. The positive thing is that analysis can be throwaway so you can do this multiple times.

I've used BDD for more or less six months, since v1.0 was released. Its predecessor, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery I've used for approximately four years. Cloudera Hadoop, which I've used for just over a year, sits underneath Oracle Big Data. This product provides business users with a web browser interface to the Hadoop cluster which I think is a critical gap in the Hadoop offering. BDD leverages Hive and Spark to provide users with the ability to search, explore, and visualize data from a Hadoop cluster. This is the area we are most engaged with as a professional services company.

Oracle Big Data Discovery depends on either Cloudera or Hortonworks Hadoop which are both stable and scalable base deployments.

As with most big corporations engaging with Oracle on technical support can be challenging. As a new product that seems to have a higher priority hopefully their support and development of Big Data Discovery will improve from what it was with Endeca Information Discovery.

Tableau as a tool for business users to visualize data is very popular, but the ability of Oracle Big Data Discovery to provide built in text enrichment, native support for unstructured data, and a very robust engine for search gave it some advantages to support data discovery that superseded the strengths of Tableau for data visualization. Solr provided excellent search, but not the same ease of support for text enrichment or interactive visualizations.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward, but as a new product in the market the support community is not very evolved so only a few organizations possess any real product knowledge.

As a professional service company implementation work on client sites is done by us. Regardless of who does the implementation, be sure it aligns to how your organization strategically intents to use the product. And be prepared to include training as part of the implementation to enable your target audience to take advantage of it.

Licensing costs are currently very competitive as Oracle looks to establish a market presence for BDD. Organizations that are not seeing tremendous return value on their Hadoop investment or are struggling with accessibility should take advantage of the early pricing options.

Aim to roll it out to a large cross section of your business users and structure the procedures to encourage throwaway analytics. Creating traditional dashboards and static reporting can be done with it, but this depends on the structure which makes them inherently inflexible to change. The strengths of Hadoop to store unstructured data and the ability of it to explore, search, and visualize that data means users can be rapidly exploring their data.