Oracle Database Reviews

This is our database for ERP and all other things.

I am not an IT person. I am an end-user of this solution, and based on my experience, it is comfortable to work with. Everything is okay, and the data is timely available. It can also be easily integrated.

Their local support can be better. Local support is a challenge in Africa for all IT companies.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

We have approximately a hundred users in our organization. We plan to keep using this solution.

Their technical support is good, but there is no local support. Local support is a challenge in Africa for all IT companies.

For deployment, we have three full-time employees and a few consultants.

We have bought a license, and it was a one-time cost.

I would rate Oracle Database a nine out of ten. My experience as an end-user has been good with this solution. I have not used any other product or have knowledge of any other product.

Oracle RDBMS is being used for our SAP ERP, analytics, SAP SRM, SAP SCM , SAP BOBJ, and SAP Solman.

It is reliable and well accepted. 

It gives DB consistency, supports disaster recovery (DR), is tunable, and handles large DB sizes.

The compression does not give much value-add or provide performance benefits as was highlighted.

Cloud installations using Oracle are not supported by SAP.

The license cost needs to be optimized. The licensing cost is very high compared to other RDBMS. 

Of course, it has been around forever, so the scalability of Database is, in my experience, the most valuable feature. The fact that there's so many applications written for it is great. We've seen others who have used other databases, but they don't have nearly the suite of applications and APIs to work with as RDBMS has.

It is such a mature product with the ability to handle many things. The newer version, 12c, has some features that people have been asking for. It was the same way going from 10 to 11 to 12, as they always seem to be listening to the customers and adding in some more features that they need.

With Oracle, the complexity of Database makes it a little bit more cumbersome. You're going to generally have more of a senior DBA to handle the intricacies when you get a large, very high, and intensive database that needs to be up all the time. You have to have a little bit more expertise in there.

We've had no issues deploying it, but, again, it requires expert administration from a more senior DBA.

Usually, you don't see any stability issues, but that really depends on the level of expertise of the DBA handling it.

There are no scalability issues, so long as the DBA is experienced.

The more expertise you have, the more the interfaces and UI become straightforward and easier to use in the initial setup.

If you look at the price point with it and how they structure the licensing, it is definitely going to be one of the more expensive ones. You do get everything with it because they throw everything in with the kitchen sink. If they could pare down the solution, then you could just choose the pieces that you want and maybe pricing might be a little bit more along the lines of what customers could use. It is definitely on the more expensive side.

In terms of scalability, make sure it's going to be what you need. Know exactly what purpose you're going to be using your database for. I'm one of the few people who knows a lot of different kinds of databases and which is best for what you want to do.

It's the only database you can operate at a very high professional level and that offers what the customers need from the product, ACID.

It's a crucial and critical part of our everyday business. That's what it does.

Real zero-downtime patching, that's what I want.

When you have a fallback system with RAC and Data Guard, the autonomous help framework could support it, but collecting the logs and reading the logs is still a nightmare. Improving this would be very good. The way Oracle does it today is OK, with in-memory options, with NoSQL database integrated and so on, but it could be a really good feature for the future.

We have scaled it, but not to a very high extent.

I think as we start to get into the IT business more and more, we will see how we need it. We are now operating an Oracle RAC system, so we can scale when required.

Technical support is kind of different because at some point, you reach the point where you can't proceed any further with stand-up processes. You need to have context and background information about the company. We're lucky that we can get in touch directly with the development team. We get help there.

Normally we have very complex problems when we have them. When we communicate with them using the standard channels, it does not fit. But, as I’ve mentioned, we have the direct line of communication with the development.

It's like, how do you decide that you need electricity at home? It’s a given requirement from the business. We've been working with Oracle for many, many years and using the product for many, many versions.

We did the initial setup ourselves. We have a huge framework in which we did the complete setup. We installed the clusters. It was not straightforward. For such as huge company like ours, it’s not straightforward. There are too many management processes around and too many specialties in the company.

We do not have any other vendors on a shortlist at this time.

We have three flavors of relational databases: MS SQL, Oracle, and MySQL. MySQL should fit the open-source aspect, and then we have two huge relational databases. Therefore, MS SQL is more for the smaller deployment and Oracle is for the huge deployments. SAP release 3 runs on Oracle, too. It was in the company. We didn't decide to use Oracle or not. It was there.

We just offer it to our customers and they choose. The mission-critical stuff runs on Oracle.

It's very professional and there are good structures implemented there. When you are willing to pay, you can get everything. Basically, what you pay for with Oracle is the maturity of the product, and that is something you can rely on.

Know how Oracle works. They say it's always been like that: you first sell, then you fulfill. You have to know that and that it's okay. You have to know that the new features will not work immediately.

When we're looking at a vendor like Oracle, we look at two areas. One is the technical part and the other is that it's a huge company. When we have problems, there is a huge organization behind it that can support it. We have a lot of ways to escalate issues. We look for a really huge company with a lot of people with whom we can get in contact. When we go to open-source projects or to smaller projects and we have problems, it's not as easy. Communicating with Oracle is easier to manage.

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.

We like and appreciate the fact that Database is the industry standard for RDBMS solutions. Because of this, we know that the product is constantly being developed and improved in terms of functionalities and stability. It's very stable and a very secure place to store data.

We know that it's an investment that gives us peace of mind. It's mature and has a broad community of users.

There are a lot of features that I'm just not sure of yet in their ability to provide us value. I'd like to try a rack implementation and a replication-type software, though I'm not sure of their ability to add value. A more specific area of improvement, would be in technical support. It needs to be better, especially for Oracle's flagship product.

I've been working with it since the 90s, going back to 733.

We don't have any issues deploying it.

We haven't had any issues with crashing or downtimes or anything due to the product. It's been very stable, and there's not really even a thought of it being unstable.

Some of our bigger projects that are non-E-Business Suite, like SAP implementations, go up to five terabyte databases and there no problems scaling there. We've had no issues with inability to scale.

Technical support is definitely challenging as they are not always the most forthcoming with information, nor are they the most highly-trained techs when you open SRs. There have definitely been issues there, especially compared to the costs that you pay for the support.

There's always room for improvement, but we're happy overall.

Lately in 12c, they've actually come out with an adaptive optimizer, which I think is great strides in getting performance and doing the right things in the database and getting those queries back to the end users just as fast as they can without a DBA having to do anything about it. A lot of the times the optimizer can now adapt and actually learn from itself and store that information off, so it's kind of an interesting implementation that they've done.

Definitely the quality, enterprise-wide they have all the bells and whistles if you need a stable, secure environment, Oracle's the only way to go.

I think they're heading on to the track of automating some of the things that DBA's had to do, like again the adaptive optimizer. We don't have to worry about statistics all the time. That'll actually grow and learn itself.

Basically with the Real Application Clusters and Data Guard and all that, disaster recovery should be no problems with Oracle. I mean, if you have an outage getting across different data centers, all of that is pretty well baked in right now.

With the Real Application Clusters, Exadata, they've just answered a lot of that. They're coming up with in 12.2 with sharding, to be able to scale it across worldwide so very, very efficient that way.

Oracle's licensing is kind of a con. It's the expense of it depending on all of the features that you want. That would be the main consideration I think as a company when they're looking at different database vendors. Plus, just what I mentioned, the stability and the security aspects of it.

Evaluation criteria: stability, security, all of that. Be able to back it up. If there is a disaster, be able to easily recover it. Data is becoming increasingly important. With so much of it in the world right now that anything you lose, or can be hacked into can be very serious. It's definitely a vendor that's selling databases, it's something that we have to be concerned about.

Security should always be on database vendors minds because as soon as they plug one hole, somebody else is going to find another hole. Apple just lately trying to open that phone up for the terrorists that was kind of a major thing, and they hacked it. There is always people trying to get into different data sets so very important especially with your credit cards and everything else that are stored in databases needs to be continually looked after and improved upon.

Rating: I would say it's the leading [solution], a ten, of all the vendors that are out there and security, stability, scalability, all of that. 

I'm excited about the sharding feature that they're implementing and it seems like it's going to help huge companies that have data all over the world to make it more efficient, more perform better.

1. Adaptive Query Optimization - enable the optimizer to make run-time adjustments to execution plans and discover additional information that can lead to better statistics. This new approach is extremely helpful when existing statistics are not sufficient to generate an optimal plan.
2. Pluggable databases - allows you to put 253 databases into one instance of Oracle.
3. Redaction Policy - The Oracle Database 12c provides runtime protection of sensitive data. The stored data remains unchanged, while the data to be displayed to the end user is transformed on-the-fly before leaving the database.

I have worked on an Oracle databases that processes over 100 billion rows daily as well as provide reporting in a timely manner to end users. Oracle's years of maturity and continuous improvement allows the database to perform exceptionally well especially on Oracle's Exadata hardware.

I would like to see Oracle Business Intelligence and maintenance tools incorporate virtual reality interfaces so DBAs and end users could interact with the database.

I have used Oracle over 15 years and the database is very scalable, reliable, and well supported.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We haven't needed to scale it.