Oracle Database Reviews

Our primary use for all Oracle Activity is to maintain and monitor six database servers.

For the past nine years, we have been supporting our client's company database fully with developer and database support.

The features that we find most valuable are Data Pump, GoldenGate, and the RMAN (Recovery Manager).

This product would be improved with Support Services for more production access.

Container Databases (CDBs) help reduce server sprawl and manage resources in a much better way. It's a feature that consolidates all your application data with Oracle database metadata, still keeping a strict role to manage each of them respectively. With the CDBs, it's become easy to deploy, clone and administer Oracle databases.

Application Continuity simply helps application to be highly available by doing a lot fewer application code changes.

It helped consolidate most of our database servers, and saved annual maintenance costs of up to 23% on physical servers.

Oracle could provide a few extra features as part of the standard offering in their main license.

I have used it for a few years.

It depends on the kind of database solution you are applying, but I have not yet encountered any stability issues.

10/10 MOS Support is actually something you can heavily rely on.

Technical support is 9/10, very proactive and very helpful.

Use licensing with caution, read the fine print. :) ?This is an important point and usually it's not skipped by the companies paying for the license. Nonetheless, Oracle supports your applications and database only if Oracle has certified the ?hardware and software that the companies have used to build and deploy their applications and databases on; which basically means that you have to use industry-standard hardware and software.

It is possible that your hardware is not supported or has been desupported for a specific version of the Oracle product, so just remember to read the fine print before you deploy your applications.

MS SQL Server was also under consideration, but we had more Oracle DBA's to work with and Oracle’s training requirements were also more favorable.

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.

I can't think of any specific features that are the most valuable, but all the small things that Oracle does compared to the free alternatives, such as MySQL, are valuable. I do appreciate having that power to do it. Even though 90% percent of the time I don't use those features, it's nice to have them should I need them.

It actually kind of fractured our organization. Half of us use Oracle for some things and the other half use MySQL for the other. I really don't care; I use both. We use Oracle a lot for authentication. I can't think of anything specific that is all that great about it. I'm not bashing Oracle, I just can't think of anything. I can't think of anything that makes me think, “Oh, we have to have it.”

I can't think of any but I know my manager was unhappy with certain features that we use, but we had to pay for those features along with a bunch of other ones that we didn't use. He wanted an option to not bundle a lot of the features. Other than that, I don't know the specifics about what he was talking about.

It's got a lot of good features, but at the same time sometimes certain niche things aren't mentioned. Some things break and I don't know why. Then when I Google it, there are thousands of reasons why they break, so it takes me a while to really pinpoint why. Its optimization could be improved a little bit, but it's good for the most part.

It's very stable, we've had no problems with that.

For the most part, as long as you do your research and don't screw up your table structures, I don't have any scalability problems.

I haven't used technical support; every issue I've run into I've been able to Google it and figure it out. I haven't had to call in or anything.

I believe we used MySQL for a while, it was free and that was the only reason we were using it. It wasn't the most stable, it was a little slow, and it doesn't scale as well, so we decided to go with a more professional solution.

I don't know why we chose Oracle, but I know we were debating between Oracle, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL. For whatever reason, I'm not sure why my manager went with Oracle, but we did.

Take cost into consideration and pick whichever really suits your needs. Every single database has its strong and weak points. I wouldn't say it's an end-all, be-all solution, but it just happens to work for us.

I think that Oracle today is the most powerful relational database, especially for PCI compliance, high availability, and high performance. Those are the Oracle database features I most appreciate.

I am waiting for Oracle to provide an interface between NoSQL and the Oracle database, so I don't have to go deeply into NoSQL. I just need to have an interface between them; to use SQL language to check that NoSQL or Hadoop is not down, and so-on.

We have been using it for more than 15 years.

The most important down time you can have for developers is when we upgrade from one version to another.

Otherwise, we have not had any stability issues, especially with 10g or 11g.

It's a very, very strong database.

It is scalable, especially with RAC. We can add more had more processors on the machine and through Oracle, I can use only part of the CPU on the server, so I don't have to pay too much.

Technical support is good, very good. It's a little bit expensive, but very efficient.

Initial setup is not difficult. For me, it's very easy, because I have a lot of experience on it.

The important thing with Oracle is that everywhere you go on Google, you see a million people have experienced the same problem. You always have something when you have an issue.

You should buy this solution. That's what I'm saying, in my company, a very big company. Every time someone asks, that’s what I say, because I'm involved with Oracle a lot. That's normal.

It's very stable. It's a database that's easy to recover if you need ways to restore and recover, and I like the performance.

The feature that I would like is a way to grant select tables of one user to another without needing to specify each one separately, or creating a trigger to do this automatically. Being able to grant all privileges of some object or some schema to another schema would be good.

Also, I would like to have a better Export Data Hub. The old export allowed you to export remotely, and Data Hub is just locally using directories or a database link. I would like to have Export Data Hub using the SQL match instead of directories or another database. Just like the old export.

I've been using it for around 10 years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. When I need to deploy other databases or other schemas, it's very easy to do. Now with the multitenant model, it's even easier.

They have this thing that you can only create a P1 for something that is harming your production. Sometimes I would like to create a P1 for other problems, but I can't, because it's something that is putting my company at risk. They are good in supporting us, but I don't like the policy of P1, P2, P3, or P4.

It's very easy to set up, not for someone who has never worked with it, but if you had a junior or someone a little more experienced than a junior, they are good enough to deploy.

I think it's very expensive when compared to the others. Depending on the size of the company, smaller ones will not choose Oracle because they can get fixed solutions or less expensive solutions. If I were Oracle, I would create a solution that would serve these small companies for a better price, maybe with a lot less options, but not as expensive as some other options.

I think security is a concern in the database, so you need to take care before granting some privileges to a DBA and it can become very easy to break. I would say to be very careful before granting permissions or configuring the database.

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.

The best thing about Oracle Database is that it performs well when measured on any scale. As a Database developer, I think it offers the best development tools of any database solution.

Its cross-platform compatibility provides flexibility for different platforms like Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. Oracle offers high-performance handling of XML data.

We are currently using Oracle 11g, where as Oracle 12c now has all the major features for easy development. However, as the database industry is growing, there is room to enhance object reusability by introducing some development framework or out-of-the-box concepts.

I've used it for 12 years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the stability.

It is scalable. Indeed, you don’t have to worry about scalability as this is Database's strength -- it grows with your business and is an all-in-one solution.

I have had some discussions with a few DBAs. Oracle technical support is not very good compared to Microsoft technical support, the latter of which is more proactive and reachable. Secondly, Oracle technical support is more costly than its competitors.

I also have worked as a developer on Microsoft Dynamics AX with SQL server. The main reason we changed was because of the AX Dynamics cost - initial cost, customization, and maintenance. It is much lower than Oracle Database.

As with any vendor resource, availability is also a major issue for Oracle. As there is a lot of development flavors for Microsoft, resources are easily available and it's more flexible to work with on different technology. In comparison, Oracle resources are scarce and are mostly away from new market trends.

The complexity of the initial setup depends, as it is a self-manageable database for small databases, whereas for mid and enterprise levels, it needs serious attention.

The cost of Oracle Database is a little higher than competitor products, but it gives good ROI in the longer run.

For long term investment, it is the best option. Initially, its cost is higher, but its running cost is less than other competitors.

This is the best database product on the market.