Oracle Database Reviews

I use the solution in my company for developing applications, of course, with the ERP in place, along with the different modules that are related to the financial system, HR's internal functionalities, project management, and invoicing. My company uses it more for the in-house development of IT applications.

The most valuable feature of the solution is database management, which is good, along with the backup. The server-based programming, PL/SQL, is good.

The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. In general, the product should be priced more economically for users.

I have been using Oracle Database for thirty years.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. You can always tune the parameters and decide on how much to scale based on the memory available. You can configure your SGA along with memory, and once you outgrow it, you can always reconfigure and re-initiate it, making it a scalable tool.

Over a long period of time, my company has been dealing with a user base of various sizes. There are times when the user base can go up to 200 people.

The product is extensively used, and my company plans to increase its use in the future.

I have used the product's online community to get answers to the questions I post related to the tool.

I have experience with Ingres. My company started to use Oracle Database because of its flexibility and the availability of more tools. The overall comprehensiveness provided by the tool was good.

The product's initial setup phase was very easy. There are no real challenges in the setup phase, as it is a sophisticated product.

For the product's deployment phase, if you have your operating system ready, you can decide whether you want to put Oracle Database in Microsoft or Linux, after which you need to make the prerequisites available for JRE or Microsoft's .NET platform. Once the prerequisites are in place, you can download a suitable VM, and the deployments can be done.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

There is no need for a team to take care of the deployment and maintenance of the product since the tool is well-documented and a lot of information is available in it. In the past, the deployment and maintenance of the product used to be a bit tough. Over a period of time, the deployment and maintenance of the product have become quicker and easier.

The product is costly. You need to pay for all the product components that you use. You can go for an annual or multi-year subscription model, depending on your requirements.

Currently, my company uses the tool for record-keeping purposes, specifically for some information. My company uses Power BI for real-time data analytics.

The critical applications our company runs on Oracle Database are attached to areas involving invoicing and financial systems.

The security features of Oracle Database are good, reliable, and stable.

The cloud-based solution available is good for those who plan to start using the tool. Instead of choosing the on-premises version, people can go with the tool's cloud-based version. Potential uses of the product should attempt to start small, and then when the need arises, they can grow the tool's usage capacity. The tool offers fallback, resilience, and redundancy features, which you can always add whenever required.

Though I have never tried to use the migration capabilities of the product, I know that there is a process for using it, which is not very difficult but sometimes time-consuming.

I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I use Oracle Database in my company for database management.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is very scalable and secure while offering very high performance. I have to ensure our company's system runs twenty-four hours, seven days a week for three-sixty-five days a year. The tool provides me with peace of mind since I know that nothing can go wrong in terms of fraudulent attempts where the product's security can be compromised. The aforementioned parameters are what I look at when it comes to the product.

There are no significant areas related to drawbacks in the product that I want to point out. When it comes to the product, it is the way you deploy or the cluster that makes some difference. How you implement or deploy the product can be an area of concern that can be made a bit easier. There is a close connection between the skill set of your company's team that handles the deployment and implementation phases and the user-friendliness that the system provides. There is a need to ensure that there is a trade-off between the skill set of the product's users and the ease of use the product offers. The aforementioned reasons make it very difficult to compartmentalize the issues in the product. It is important to ensure how well-versed your company's team is with the deployment of the product and with some of the parameters that need to be tuned up so that the product can offer high performance on your system. How the product can be made efficient in terms of performance is a function of your company's team's expertise rather than the product's capability.

I have been using Oracle Database for fifteen to twenty years.

The tool gets upgraded mostly by the company, but many times, immediate upgrades are not possible because of so many reasons. There are so many strategic decisions that may be made by the company over why we may not want to enroll in a new version, which might be available in the market because of the transition phase, testing, and all the efforts needed to take care of the process. The upgrade is just not a run in an environment simply because you have to test it out and do a battle test before even announcing that it is ready to enter the production phase. It is not always possible to put in so much effort at the time when an upgrade is announced, so it has to be prioritized later on. There are so many reasons why we will not be going in for the latest version after just some limited testing.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I have experience with IBM Db2.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it.

In general, the product is strong enough and offers high performance. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

Because I worked with various organizations, most of the time we used it for government and other centers, such as managing transport systems.

It performs quite well.

In general, Oracle is quite good. It's a large database that houses many applications.

In terms of backup Basically, I believe that will depend, particularly on backup and those components, on the knowledge that you have. However, if you have the proper knowledge, it should not be a problem for you. The database does not cause problems when properly configured and best practices of database administration are followed.

When compared to others such as Postgres, Oracle is a very good database.

Oracle Database is easy to use.

The only issue was the same as with the EDS licenses. When you try to tell customers that you can critically patch their system, they always complain about the cost. In terms of pricing, I believe Oracle should be aware of this fact. I'm not sure if it's because it's only happening here in Africa, but some of the guys I spoke with prefer to patch all the time. When you ask people in this town, "Look guys, can you critically patch the system?" they will tell you it's too expensive.

That, I believe, is a major issue. But with that solution, I'm not sure how it can be resolved, but I think most people will be willing to always do patches on a monthly, quarterly basis, as Oracle recommends.

They can increase the number of products available in free accounts for people to try. So many more people will be able to migrate to the cloud.

I have been using Oracle Database for approximately five years.

We are using both old and new versions.

Oracle Database is quite scalable.

They have a large number of options depending on the needs of the organization, allowing any organization to deploy according to their requirements. You can add or remove items as time allows, it's very scalable.

In our organization, we have more than 100, but less than 1,000 users.

Recently, I proposed the migration from on-premises to the cloud. I've noticed that alternatives are bringing a lot in the business, particularly in the cloud spectrum. Convincing customers to try to migrate to the cloud today is another task. It's more like there's something frightening there. I'm not sure what they're afraid of, but it's a matter of education and demonstration. I can download Oracle Database and experiment with it on my own, as long as I'm not using it for commercial purposes. I can do it if I try it on my own. 

I believe they should increase that even in the cloud. They have an Oracle Always Free account on the cloud, but it has a time limit, of a month. They will give you one month's free package for you to try. I have tried it many times. What I've noticed is that they should add more products to the Always Free account so that people, particularly on our continent, who are still skeptical of the cloud, are not left out.

They believe they will inquire as to where we will store our information. How do you know you're getting access to our data? As a result, there is still a lot of information that needs to be taught. I think the best thing Oracle could do is try to improve on that so that most people can keep trying and see that there's nothing to be skeptical about.

Technical support is quite good.

The initial setup is quite easy. In part, it is easy depending on the scope of the project. Maybe it's different for each project. For example, if you need to set up a rec, you need to know what is required, because this is a single database.

It took a few hours to deploy.

For my personal use, I completed the installation myself. 

When deploying for production, I worked with a partner who had a specialized team of system administrators and application developers.

This solution is only deployed and maintained by me.

It's been quite a long time since I looked into the price.

I believe they should also devote more time to learning Oracle. They will also notice that Oracle is not difficult to install or administer if best practices are followed. And, depending on your goals, I believe anyone can do it. Because Oracle Database has so many features, you can do audit vaults and data guides on it, depending on how you want to run your business.

Another thing I would recommend is that people be aware that Oracle has opened its website for people to sign up for free and then download the software for practice, study, or training purposes only. If you intend to use it for production purposes, that is when you should purchase a license.

Because of the prices, I would rate Oracle Database a nine out of ten, otherwise, I think that Oracle is still the best.

We use the solution as a database, basically. We do not use it for the data warehouse. It's just a few databases.

We're satisfied with the solution. The performance is great.

We find the solution to be stable.

The scalability is very good. You can expand it if you need to.

We don't have any concerns with the data activity and recovery capabilities.

The initial setup is easy.

The cost of Oracle is far too high. They should work to make it less expensive. We're going to stop using it for this reason. 

They could improve the scalability a bit. There are other options that are more scalable, for example. 

I've been using the solution for almost 10 years now. It's been a decade. I've used it for a while. 

The stability is very good and it has very good performance. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We don't have an issue with the solution's scalability. It's expandable. 

What we see is Mongo and Cassandra, and many other databases that are extremely scalable and distributed. With Oracle, obviously, there are other types of databases that are performing better in this area. Obviously, they could improve scalability from a scalability perspective.

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

We are using DB2 on mainframes and we do have Microsoft SQL, and then we started using PostgreSQL as well.

We haven't had a problem with the initial setup. It's very simple and straightforward. 

I haven't installed it in recent times, however, from what I recall, the actual production upgrade took us probably less than four hours.

Currently, the database team is around 40 or more people from engineering and from operations. It's a full database engineering and operations team so it's covering other databases as well - such as DB2 and SQL and Cassandra and other databases. You can take three to six engineers and have them handle deployment and maintenance, although everyone works on other things.

We handled everything in-house. We did not need the assistance of integrators or consultants. 

It's CPU-based licensing. The cost is far too high. We're looking into other options to avoid having to pay so much. There are both licensing and support costs you need to consider. 

We have been looking at less expensive options such as Azure SQL and PostgreSQL.

We're a customer and an end-user.

We use both cloud-based and on-premises deployments. 

While I might have recommended Oracle in the past, due to the cost factor, it's hard to recommend it these days. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are primarily using it for software. We have a lot of software applications that are connected to this database.

Scalability, reliability, and performance are what we are getting with this solution. It is highly scalable and has very good performance. It also has in-built monitoring and optimized optimizer.

It is quite stable and secure. When it comes to integration, you can integrate it with other tools as well. However, we have been using Oracle Database within our own premises. So, it is kind of difficult for us to basically do a kind of integration with the outside software. We prefer to do things within our own premises.

There are SQL plan flips that are happening with version 12c. We would basically like to have the next version wherein we don't see such plan flips because they create performance issues. There are quite a lot of features that I would like to see, but this is the main one for now.

It has been over 20 years since we have been using Oracle Database.

It is absolutely stable.

It is highly scalable. It is scalable to the best of our needs. We have around 10,000 to 12,000 users.

We have three levels of technical support. The L1 level support is in-house. For L2 level support, we have an infrastructure team. For L3 level support, we have a contract with Oracle, and whenever we need it, we get their input.

We have been using Oracle since the time I have been working in this organization. I am not sure what was used previously. I am aware of 20 years, which is quite a long time.

It was very easy to install. It takes around two hours. This is a production database, so there have been a lot of validations. We do a lot of pre validations and post validations.  

For these kinds of installations, we have an infrastructure team. We have people here who do the installation. We have four trained Oracle Database administrators.

I would definitely recommend this solution. Oracle is already an established product. It doesn't depend on my recommendation. 

We will keep using this solution because we need to keep our data within our premises for our business model. As of now, we have no plans to go to the cloud and use any of the cloud services.

I would rate Oracle Database a nine out of ten.

• Security and Scalability
• I have used Oracle technologies for last two decades apart from other similar vendors like MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, etc.

It helped build a strong core application layer

Its a natural choice for any complex enterprise relational system

• Security and Scalability
• I have used Oracle technologies for last two decades apart from other similar vendors like MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, etc.
• Power of Oracle combined with robust Unix platforms like Linux or AIX makes it powerful and secure as compared to MS SQL on Windows 
• IBM DB2 needs indepth technical expertise and lot of workarounds or automation to build a strong solution, MS SQL is on Windows and that makes it not the best choice

Support and Patching.

I found MS SQL Server support more helpful in many cases where in they internally rope in technology experts from different layers rather than pushing back on the clients, something Oracle can incorporate for sure.

Multiple issues, but mostly triggered from lower layers like OS, Network, storage layers.

Oracle GRID is sensitive to underlying network and disk timeouts and node evictions may happen if disk and network systems are not optimized

Oracle systems are highly scalable, Backup and Recovery strategy needs to be tweaked and is not as scalable as core database system. It needs some special attention to meet your RTO

Customer Service:

I would rate it 6/10. Many times the support is not able to solve the problems and they would put you into loops and escalate to their dev team which may take months to come back with a solution. Sometimes the solution never arrives and you are forced to upgrade to higher version.

Technical Support:

I would rate it 7/10.

The most valuable feature we have found is the multi-tenancy. You can set up background processes and memory at the container level, not at the pluggable level. he second thing is, I can set up a disaster recovery solution for the container database, not at the pluggable level, so that if I have more pluggable databases, I do not need to worry about disaster recovery setup at the pluggable database level. I only have to set it up one time at the containment level. I can reduce my time, effort, cost, everything. I feel this is one of the best features in 12c, multi-tenancy.

Another valuable feature Oracle has released is the Flex ASM in RAC. In 10g and 11c, if something goes wrong for you with A, some instance, your database will go down. But in 12c, if something goes wrong for you with A, some instance, your database will not go down. You automatically use the next two machines, A, some instance. These are two wonderful features that we have used in database 12c.

One more very cool feature is called Information Lifecycle Management, ILM. It is one of the best features right now.

Instead of maintaining multiple servers, multiple databases, multiple disaster recovery solution setups for several levels, if you implement the 12c multi-tenancy, I only have to set it up for one container, not for all of the pluggable databases. I can reduce my support, my time, my effort, my cost, my server cost.

Upgrades.

We have been using 12c for 10 months.

We have been using it for the past 10 months. We have not had any stability issues, at all. We updated the PSU patches, just the CPU patches; it's up and running for months.

We haven’t exactly scaled it right now. Once we upgrade the remaining databases, we can go ahead with scaling it.

We raised a couple of SR requests with the Oracle team, and they responded quickly. We have successfully upgraded one database to 12c.

We are really pretty happy. In the coming months, we are going to upgrade three to four databases to 12c. I attended an Oracle OpenWorld conference to get some information about how I can upgrade with nearly zero down time. I was looking for that.

Upgrading it is not easy, because application to application could be different architecture. Before upgrading to 12c, we have to go into QA and development, from us to QA and development. Once that is successful, you can go ahead with production. Until now, out of six databases, we have upgraded to 12c on one platform; it was smooth.

When you upgrade from 11g to 12c, consider your execution plans. Before upgrading, check it out in the QA and development environments. The third thing is, when you go about upgrading from 11g to 12c, plan how many databases you are going to make as pluggable, and how much memory it requires, and what flat file from exactly you are moving to upgrade. These are the three things you have to keep it mind when it comes to upgrading from 11g to 12c.

Although it is smooth coming into production, you have to be careful. Until now, it has been very smooth. We didn't raise any issues, but we have raised a couple of SR requests. Oracle has provided a smooth solution.

We use it for different applications in my company.

Stability and availability are the features I like the most in the solution. Transparent data encryption (TDE) is a feature I like the most in the product.

The product's price can be lower since it is a bit of an expensive solution.

Some engineers have the right skill set to resolve issues, but the support could be better.

I have been using Oracle Database for over ten years. I am an end user of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

The patching is an area that takes a long time, so we are trying to find another solution to minimize the downtime and do the patching.

Oracle Database is easier to scale up. The number of users using the solution in our organization depends on different applications normally, and it may be over a million being used by users for a customer.

The support from Oracle is okay. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The product's installation is difficult compared with other solutions since it can't support other platforms making the installation complicated.

The PoC phase to deploy the tool on-premises will take at least one week.

The solution is deployed on an AWS cloud.

Around two or three people were needed for installation.

My company has opted for perpetual licensing. We only need to make payments toward the licensing of the product.

It is not very easy to maintain Oracle Database. We need nearly twenty people in India to maintain the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.