Oracle Database Review

The most valuable feature for us is certainly the scalability of the DB as we need capabilities for multiple terabytes of data.

I don't know much about other organizations, and I've used SQL in the past at other companies, but because most of our customers are different federal government agencies, it's provided us scale to support many terabytes of data.

Recently with the 12.102 version, Oracle decreased the number of hardware you can use. I would like them to revert that back to where it was. We use the standard edition, so obviously that's going to hurt our customers as Oracle is reducing the hardware we can use.

We've been using DB since the beginning, so 33 years now. I haven't used it personally since then, but the company has.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's definitely stable. We've had no issues with instability.

It's very scalable, which is the primary reason we use it.

Oracle's technical support is better than most, but it's not perfect. Obviously, when we open a ticket for support, it needs to get escalated a couple of times before we actually get an engineer who can really get down and help us. That's typical of the industry, so it's better than most, but not perfect.

The complexity of the initial setup depends. The patch releases have been simple: you download, you install, and it works fine. There have been no issues that we've run into there. The major upgrades, however, I think with the new 12.102, they've made some changes in it, so we're still trying to figure that one out.

It's a great product, no doubt about it. Oracle did a good job on it and that's why they have a big market share. I think if you're starting from scratch, look for other alternatives. Investigate the alternatives to see if they can meet your needs.

Technically, it's almost flawless, I would say. There are bugs in it of course, but they are bugs that doesn't impact us as a company.