Oracle Database Reviews

We are fine with the performance and everything they offer. 

They are the market leader, therefore we don't have any problems or complaints as of now.

The support is always very helpful and responsive. 

The solution is very flexible. It offers a variety of setups.

The stability is good. 

While we get some performance issues from time to time, we get very good support from the Oracle support team, and those issues are sorted out. 

The setup process can be a bit complex. You will want to have someone on-side that can help you navigate the process.

I've been working with the solution for 20 years. 

For the most part, the performance is good and it offers good stability. There aren't really bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's a market leader in RDBMS. It is quite good, compared to other RDBMS such as Db2, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL.

Technical support has been great. As part of operations, people just get some issues, sometimes, however, there might be different reasons for that that may not be related to Oracle itself. Overall we are fine with all the services it offers.

This is a very, very vast database, and it offers a lot of architecture. We can go for grid architecture or rack architecture. We can go for the long architecture or we can go with a simple standalone database. Depending on what an organization wants, we can adapt. However, the implementation also depends on what you want or your organization wants. If you're looking for very complex data centers, for example, having one of the primary databases running in London, and your secondary database or DR site running in Singapore, and both are running on a different rack, you can do that, however, the setup process will be unique to you. There isn't a standard time it takes. It offers a lot of flexibility. Obviously, if you go for the high scalability, high availability, all those features, which are provided by Oracle, then it becomes slightly complex, and we need a dedicated team to handle all those setups. 

If you have the requirement of RDBMS and if you're posting logs there, then, I would suggest that you should go for Oracle. It all depends on your organization's technology roadmap. If a company is more inclined towards Microsoft technology, and they're inclined to Azure cloud, then probably they should go with an SQL Server. However, if they're inclined towards AWS or if they don't have any such consent, and if their costing allows, then Oracle is the best bet.

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

I use Oracle in two systems. The first one is called the Complaint Management System, and the second one was for Human Resources for the Ministry of Electricity in Iraq. 

The Complaint Management System is related to a call center. There is a call center responsible for writing down the complaints from the customers about their network electricity. If there is an error they reach out to us. There is an operator there writing down this complaint using his terminal. There are many different call centers in the country and all of them write up these complaints using the Oracle Database.

Oracle has always been a wonderful database. 

It is reliable. It's very stable. 

The solution has everything you are looking for in terms of features on offer. It's very complete. 

The solution can be quite expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on the pricing model in order to figure out how to lower the licensing.

It takes time to learn Oracle. There's a bit of a learning curve. It's not easy to use at first, however, slowly, day by day, you can get and develop your skills. 

There are a lot of YouTube videos and tons of material on Google that you can access. You can also easily find so many training institutes all over the world if you really want to understand aspects of the product. It would be ideal if Oracle could initiate some sort of learning center in Iraq. Even if it's just on Youtube, if it can be catered towards Iraqis to showcase the technology in the form of online Youtube videos or webinars, it would be extremely useful for expanding the solution within the Iraqi market. Right now, competitors like Microsoft can easily come in and just say "here's what we do, and at less cost than Oracle".

The initial setup is a little complex.

I've been using the solution for about ten years at this point. It's been around a decade, and therefore I've used it for quite a while.

The solution is stable most of the time. Unfortunately, I faced a few different issues. I was luckily able to solve them.

It's very important, if you choose Oracle as a solution, to also get the support as well. You can technically live without it, however, if you run into issues, Oracle can help you when you have the support that they offer.

In my case, I didn't have support so I had to kind-of feel around for a solution. I made the mistake, after the first year, of not renewing my support and I really should have.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it outward, it can do so.

While it's my understanding that technical support is good, frankly, for the first year, I didn't ask them for any help. Therefore, I don't have any experience with Oracle support.

That said, I have full faith that they will respond very well to any issues.

In my case, I had support for the first year of service and then did not renew it. You really should renew though. 

The initial setup was not really so straightforward. It's actually rather complex.

There are two ways to start with Oracle. You can go in by yourself and try to learn as you go or you can study a bit at an institute or school so that you can get pretty comfortable with the product. If you have some knowledge, there's less of a learning curve during installation.

The support does cost extra, however, it is worth the extra money. It really comes in handy if you run into problems.

We're just customers and end-users. We don't have a partnership or special business relationship with Oracle.

I really enjoy using the solution. It is stable and reliable. 

It's more expensive than Microsoft's options, however, I personally prefer working with it. It's worth the extra money. 

Aside from stability issues and a certain level of complexity, it's quite a good solution. I would rate it eight out of ten.

I use Oracle Database for storage, proxy, and general database stuff.

The reporting feature was fine for what we were using it for. Oracle Database has been serving its purpose, and I was happy. 

Their migration strategies could be better because most of these companies keep the same version for six or seven years and then update it to the latest version.

I have been using Oracle Database for five years.

Oracle Database is scalable. It simply comes down to how you design the transaction screen of the database. We have more than 100 users because they use the applications.

Before Oracle Database, I used IBM Db2 and Microsoft SQL.

The initial setup was straightforward. It doesn't take long once you have the server. I would say it takes a maximum of five minutes to implement this solution. We have five technical people to deploy and maintain this database solution.

We implemented this solution by ourselves.

The price is relative. Licensing costs differ based on how often you'll use the product. They also provide discounts based on the bandwidth or the use cases you want to run on it.

I would recommend this solution to potential users. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle Database a nine.

If you remember the old Saturday Night Live skit by the baseball player, Oracle's been very, very good to me. I chose to work with databases and specifically Oracle right out of college, the 80s. It was a right career decision. It took me this far. I'll probably get to my retirement on it. That's a pretty sound technology. Had I picked some other technology to bet on, I probably would've had to go through several different learning iterations. The Oracle Database scales well. Every time there's a new version they add the features that you are wishing they would add or finding that you need. They stay ahead of the game. A lot of times you'll talk to one of their product managers and you'll say, "Well, partitioning is great, but if it only did this," and they'll say, "Oh, well if you sign an NDA, I'll tell you." Legitimately, they've already thought of it and they're developing it, and a lot of times if you get into the beta program, you can participate in the development of those features. That's really unique. It's much better than say a community preview edition like other vendors would do.

The beta program, you sign up for and you're very proactive with it and you have direct access to people who are working on the beta itself. You can help drive the product direction and that's kind of fun.

Right now, one of the things I've been using a lot of is the In-Memory column store, which is a new Oracle 12c feature and it's gotten a lot of press. It's a great feature. If you remember a few years ago, Vertica and some other column oriented databases came out and it was all the hot rage. Now, lo and behold, starting in Oracle 12, I can have column oriented data storage and it makes my memory more efficient so I can fit more In-Memory. It makes the queries faster and it makes more queries faster because of the memory being more efficient, there are more queries that can benefit from the same amount of memory. It's literally you turn on a configuration parameter and you say alter database or table and say that that table was In-Memory, and you're done. The database does everything. It's very simple to use, very powerful, and it's exactly what people were asking for a few years ago.

The same is true, I attended some of the Oracle 12c R2 sort of pre-announcement sessions and while we're not allowed to talk about what we heard, I can say for a fact that some of the stuff that they talked about was exactly the same type of things where there's a feature that was introduced late in 11 or early in 12 and you thought, "Boy, I hope this is step one and they're going to do step two and step three." They have. Now it's not public yet, but it's very reassuring to know, again, they understand the database market and well enough to develop the features just in time.

I know that a lot of people like Oracle Enterprise Manager and it's capable and it's great, but for a lot of tasks it's overkill. They came out with this new tool in 12, the OEM Express. I would like to see that tool persist. Oracle does on occasion have a bad habit of developing a tool, I'll go back to Oracle 8 on Windows, they had a really cool little GUI for developing DBA and then it was gone a version later. I'm hoping OEM Express sticks around. I'm not saying that it competes with OEM, but a lot of times, if all I'm doing is going in and adding some space to a table space or creating a user or do something simple and easy, that flash interface local on my web browser runs 100 times faster and it's easier to find stuff because there's less features in it, so you don't have to look as far.

Oracle stability's a funny thing. I know companies who do not have any database administrators. Stability in those shops is sporadic, and it should be. You need a database administrator to oversee your databases, just like you need a manager to oversee your people. It's an asset. In fact, your data's your most important asset. You sure as heck should have a specialist.

Oracle's a very powerful, robust, capable database. However, in order to be powerful, capable, and robust, it's a little complex. You need a database administrator. I'm not saying you have to hire a six figure guy, but you've got to have somebody. I know a lot of SQL server shops where they also don't work with database administrators. They can get away with it because the database isn't quite as industrial. I'm not going to build petabyte databases in SQL server but I am going to build it in Oracle. If I've got that size, it helps to have a DBA around.

You can start with the basic database, so the Oracle single instance. You can scale that pretty much to whatever size, symmetric, multi-processing processor you want to put it on. If that's not going to scale large enough for you, then you can do RAC clusters and you can build basically a little database mainframe. If you've got extra money to spend, I've got this wonderful solution called Exadata. I wish that Exadata was it, that that was the only thing Oracle had to offer. It's that far superior to the standard database, but it requires both hardware and software and there's special licensing. You can't build an Exadata at your own and just get the software. It is just standard Oracle with some hardware tricks. That's impressive, that you can make a database machine that outruns anything and it's still the standard database. They didn't have to really change it.

Rating: I would give it a nine. The only reason I don't give it a ten is because they do keep inventing and adding more stuff. The stuff that they told me yesterday and today that'll be available in the next release, let's say next year, not only is it stuff I wanted, it's stuff I didn't even dream of. I'll be excited. If I had those features today it'd be a ten, but they're on top of it.

We are using it for inventory control. We have about 220 servers running Oracle Database, but we're migrating from Oracle to Postgres.

We've had it for a very long time, and up until they changed the way they do the billing, we were happy. A few years ago, they changed the way they charge for the product, and they hit us with a $6 million bill for one year, and that was it. People got very unhappy.

It is a mature product. It is pretty stable. I've got a lot of experience with it, so it is pretty easy to use.

The software really doesn't need any improvement, but the way they do the billing should be improved. They charge by all the chips on the server, whether you use them or not. If you have a server that has 64 chips on it and you use one chip, they charge you for 64, and that's a terrible business model.

Their support is terrible and should be improved.

I've been using Oracle Database for probably 20 years.

It is very stable. It has been around for a very long time, and it is stable now.

It scales vertically. So, the more stuff you want to do, you have to get a bigger server. That's okay if you can do that, but the strategy now is that everybody is scaling horizontally because you can buy a ton of cheap servers and spread them out all over the network.

We have about 10,000 users, and they're doing inventory control. We don't plan to increase its usage. We are planning to decrease its usage and go to Postgres.

Their support is terrible. I stand a better chance talking to my four-year-old grandson than talking to them. At least, he pays attention.

They weren't using any other product previously. They have been using Oracle for maybe 20 years.

It is very straightforward. It takes about three or four hours.

We do it ourselves. For its maintenance, there are probably seven or eight people.

Its cost is astronomical. They charge by the size of the server rather than what you're actually using. It is just a terrible business model.

It has got a ton of features that are great, but you have to pay for them, and we don't want to spend a lot of money.

If you use any of their additional products, you have to pay for those. Almost everything extra is at an additional charge. We also use RAC, and there is an additional charge for that. 

I guess they did evaluate other products, but I wasn't there.

If money is no object, it is a great product, but if you're worried about your budget, find another solution.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It is a great product. It has been around forever. It works, but it is too expensive.

It depends on the environment. Most of our customers have been using multitenant options. Advanced Compression and Advanced Security are the most valuable features in most customer environments. And many customers are also leveraging Oracle Diagnostic and Tuning Packs to enhance the performance of the database. 

The primary concern is that Oracle is highly restricted in terms of the approved technologies where we can freely deploy Oracle Database or any other Oracle product. So, for example, if we deploy Oracle products on VMware vCenter or any virtualized environment using VMware technology, we need to license a complete cluster and a complete vCenter. So that is the costliest option for us. And since Oracle doesn't approve of Google Cloud infrastructure, that means we cannot leverage the dynamic and flexible features of Google Cloud. We have multiple offerings from Oracle and our side on this one. So if we want high performance, we have to get packs or options already bundled with Oracle Database at a slightly higher price. But they are cheaper if we purchase them separately.

Also, Oracle provides the Extreme Performance Database options where you have all the features already included with the database, which will overcome all the limitations that I mentioned earlier. So we can leverage different options, but the most important is to know what we need and how much we are ready to invest in setting up the Oracle solutions. Considering certain limitations on storing big data, so that's where Oracle lacks some features. But otherwise, it is one of the best databases available.

I've been working on Oracle Database and the complete Oracle Stack for the past six years. I'm not doing any implementation development work on Oracle products. I'm only managing their compliance part.

Oracle Database is pretty scalable. And if you are planning to implement or leverage the containers, Oracle has recently added enterprise containers into their stack, so we can leverage that technology to enhance the scalability of the database.

So with Oracle, technical support is provided mainly by the technical teams who are actually working on the packaging and deployment of the Oracle Database or other products.

Installing Oracle Database is pretty simple, and Oracle also provides a starter database, which will allow you to evaluate whether you meet the specifications or not. Then you can go ahead and deploy the other features and management packs.

Oracle Database has two different types of licenses. One is the Named User, and the other is the Oracle Processor. So Oracle Named User will cost you about $950 per license, and Oracle Processor will cost you around $47,500 per processor. And on the Named User part, you need a minimum number of users to ensure that you'll buy the minimum number of licenses. So for Enterprise Edition, the minimum requirement is 25 Named Users.

And you need to pay to add options and packs. All the options and packs are available at extra cost, but Enterprise Edition includes Spatial and Graph at no extra cost. Starting last year, Oracle offered Spatial and Graph for free with the Enterprise Edition. Then there is Standard Edition, a minimal deployment option. So you can deploy Standard Edition on a server with a maximum of two sockets. That's why Enterprise Edition is typical in most cluster and complex environments.

Oracle Database has various remarkable features like Advanced Security and Advanced Compression. Oracle Database has high availability and high performance. So in those terms, Oracle Database is much more reliable than its competitor. That's why most large enterprises choose Oracle Database technologies over others. But there are other databases with some features that Oracle doesn't have. For example, with MongoDB, you can store multimedia file content and anything, and they can hold a greater amount of data. So that's where they have an advantage on Oracle Database. And most of the social media sites, like Facebook, have implemented MongoDB as the database supporting their applications.

I would rate Oracle Database at eight out of 10. For those thinking about deploying the solution, my advice would to implement Oracle Database on physical servers to avoid noncompliance. And it will be less work to manage or calculate the required licenses on the physical server. If the customer wants to leverage the virtualization technology and has a more scalable environment, I would suggest having a dedicated cluster for Oracle products for licensing purposes. For example, if you keep five physical servers in a cluster, you need to license them only once. But if those five servers are running are part of five different clusters, you need to license all the five clusters. So having a dedicated cluster can save millions of dollars.

RDBMS, we still believe, is Oracle's core product. Hence any time we are looking at any database features or building a new database, Oracle is always our product of choice because of its stability, scalability, reliability, and flexibility.

It would be the stability that's improved our organization the most. We are a 24/7 manufacturing plant. We take one day off a year, Christmas Day. Other than that, we're building and creating drugs and the stability of the Oracle database enables us to have near 100% uptime 24/7/364.

It's so expensive, particularly Enterprise Edition, and that would be my number one gripe. It's very, very expensive. Also, Oracle makes a big show of its new features and enhancers with each new release, but it's very rare that any of those enhancements come with Database by default. You have to pay for each of those enhancement -- and pay heavily at that.

In the latter versions of the 12c product, I've actually found it a little bit more difficult to set up than it was before. I find that Oracle is introducing many, many, many new features with each part of the database. Sometimes I think they're losing focus of the core components and what customers actually need. I think if they concentrated on the core elements of RDMS, which, for me, is their number one product, I think before going on the periphery and looking at small enhancements or additions to the product, they should look into making it even more stable before they do these major releases.

It's been very stable for us.

I would say the scalability sets it apart from others. We run a big manufacturing plant and the database is growing at a very very, high rate, but we know with the Oracle RDBMS, it can sustain growth from now and into the future.

I actually found that the earlier versions of RDBMS were actually easier to set up, so I've been working with the Oracle product right from Oracle 7, and I obviously will in 12c. I find now in 12c, I would expected laying out Oracle Database to become easier, but I actually think it's a little bit more complicated now in these later versions. I can categorically say that the joining up with the Oracle agent between RDBMS and Oracle Enterprise Manager is an extremely complicated process. When we were on TNG before we'd done any upgrades, the agent to get the database to talk to Enterprise Manager was a really, really simple thing to do. In fact, right now it's extremely complicated.

For installing the database or looking at the database, I would say look at the components that you need within the database. What we generally find is that most of the features that we want, or most of the features that are available in Enterprise Edition, we actually wouldn't use, so take time and you might actually see them only by using Standard Edition.

We use the solution for ETL and real-time data analytics.

We use the solution for the ERP system, which utilizes dynamic APIs, SQL, and ETL processes.

The solution is easy to use. It also offers a Database Vault.

The pricing could be improved.

I have been using Oracle Database for five years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

Depending on where you deploy, Oracle is also scalable. Sixteen sites with 50 users each are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward and took a couple of weeks. You can set up a new instance, import/export databases, or a new blank database. For on-premise, we use Jenkins. We set it up for the cloud so we can receive alerts using Jenkins or any other suitable tool.

Deployment was done in-house.

The solution is very expensive.

We had an annual subscription, but Oracle only recognizes certain VMs. Eventually, we had to migrate to Oracle Linux and allocate a specific number of CPUs to a product to reduce the price.

Four people are required to maintain the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.