They could incorporate a more secure and internet-centric management system for the platform.

We have faced issues with the product’s documentation. Sometimes, we cannot upgrade or patch it easily. The product has its limitations, and sometimes we face difficulties with these limitations. The performance needs to improve. 

It is not the features of the product that require improvement. Oracle's product support is an area of concern where improvements are required. The support team should respond faster to users facing issues with Oracle products. I work in Germany, and if I open a service request with the support team of Oracle at eight o'clock in the evening, I will most likely get connected to an engineer working in the USA at eight o'clock the next evening, which is not good.

The product's technical support services need improvement. 

The tool's setup can be easier. 

I am certain that Oracle Servers do not have RAM, not even the usual RAM, or usually obtain OCP. It would be beneficial to have dedicated RAM included in the Oracle Database Appliance.

The feature that I would like to see improve is the interface. It is really not good. I almost have to work on script by script in it. There is always some issue with the user interface.

A firewall feature embedded in the solution would be good as well. 

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

The setup is a bit complex.

The solution requires improvement regarding scalability and artificial intelligence.

The following issues need some attention:

• Ease of administration and deployment. With ODA X6-2 there are different “OAK” administration commands for the S/M/L models (e.g. “odacli”) compared to the HA model ("oakcli").
• In my opinion only one single command should be used for all ODA models, as it’s confusing.
• Some of the new commands have limitations/restrictions, though I assume they’ll be improved over time.

Oracle ODA is a fixed server appliance. It would be improved if it were an engineered system with scale-out capabilities.

Virtualization features could also be improved. A web-based GUI would be a good start.

Also VM-specific features, which provide VM-level fault tolerancy, could be added to this product. (This improvement would depends on the scale-out capabilities).

There aren't really any features that the solution is lacking.

The product is quite complex to set up, initially. It would be ideal if it was simpler.

Any limitations within the solution are case by case. The solution may work for some, but it isn't for everyone.

The product is still evolving. It could still, for example, be more user-friendly. It's not quite perfect yet.

It has limitations of Storage as well as network connectiivty over 10G Fiber. 

Customers cannot cluster multiple appliances together to create a larger cluster (beyond two servers), nor can they expand the internal disk storage of the system beyond two storage trays. This area can be improved.

I feel that there are no features that need to be added to the tool since the tool is pretty much perfect the way it is.

It could be that we may not be using Oracle and GoldenGate in the way we are supposed to be using them. We have faced a couple of issues with GoldenGate. Whenever we have issues, the Oracle support will take the time to understand how GoldenGate works. The stability of the GoldenGate could be improved, although it is pretty stable.

In terms of Database Appliance, the important thing is how you design it. If the underlying design is good, then Oracle will perform exactly how we want it to perform. But if the underlying design or the underlying architecture is bad, then Oracle is not going to give the expert the results he needs. It all depends upon the developer who designs it. I haven't seen any drawback with the Oracle database assets, and for the past five years I've been using it in our team.

In terms of what can be improved, I'd say Artificial Intelligence, AI. It would be really helpful if AI was incorporated into the solution.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Oracle Database Appliance an eight.

Currently in Ghana, where I work, there are just a few companies that can afford it, because the price is a little bit high. Even though for the private sector it's not that high, if this would come in much smaller boxes, and much cheaper, it would be much more affordable for SMBs, that's small and medium businesses. That would be helpful.

There are more freeware options out there these days that are less costly if you are a company that can work in the cloud environment. They are much better than Oracle in the price to value ratio.

Even though the solution can handle a lot of data, it's just too expensive currently.

There should be more analysis for debugging. Right now, this is only available in the Enterprise Edition. If you have the Standard Edition, like us, you're stuck with some limited functionalities. In order to access the best features, you need to level up to the Enterprise Edition.

The software comes with only four cores, which is not really very advisable. It doesn't really help in terms of the modern way of working. While the machines are getting better, at the same time they tend to run a lot of test databases, like virtual machines, and Oracle doesn't work well with all of that. It's only JBM that they work well with.

Technical support is not very helpful if you only have the Standard Edition.

They should work ell with other machines. If it could integrate better, it might be more user-friendly for businesses. 

Patching cycles have many bugs that need to be addressed.

Oracle Database Appliance is stopping support for the standard edition and only continuing support for the RAC One Node. They did not inform us and we are having problems with our customers. We are not having to change our systems from standard to something else.

The main thing would be to make ODA more affordable, to make it a more economical machine. Also, I would like to see virtualization, so you could implement all of your functions on one machine. Finally, improvement in the speed and performance would be good.

We try to operate through the ODI, or Oracle Data Integrator, to maintain data integration. We have plans to use Visual I/O for data mapping, data flow, and things like that. Oracle could improve the capabilities for visualizing without other, third-party tools. But it is OK.  

We are not looking for any new features in the product. Whatever additional utility we need we have been able to do using Hadoop for now. For us, the product can stay the same. The only way it can improve is by doing even better with integrations to other products like Hadoop.  

The platform is primarily used for departmental mid-size companies, although I do know large companies that use it, because it’s a great platform for consolidating. It is unable to expand by much, because of the way the ODA configures when you have two nodes and X number of storage. Oracle has done a good job of letting it expand storage, but the number of nodes is still limited to two. This continues to be an issue for customers.

The product's pricing is too high. We plan to migrate to another database in three to four years. 

Oracle Database Appliance could improve by having better integration.

I would like it if the scalability could be increased without having to change versions. There is only so much that you can do with it. It's not like software that you are free to install anywhere.

The following issues need some attention:

• There is no option to combine a second ODA X2 in real application cluster mode. Therefore high availability is limited to same-cabinet RAC, and to offsite standby.
• Storage expansion was not possible for ODA X2 so we frequently ran into storage limitations.
• Even in an RAC setup it is not easy to avoid downtime because OS patching requires both nodes to be patched with very short overlapping.
• Apparently there is a way to avoid downtime, but we did not explore that option anymore because we added a remote standby.

Virtualization needs improvement. It's not easy to back up the virtual machines in the Oracle VM architecture. I would also like to see native support for Veeam Backup Software.

Technical support could be much better. The maintenance for an enterprise system isn't so great. It's also much expensive.

A future release should improve the availability of networking interfaces.

Hardware expansions availability should be in-line with product support. 

The solution should have the ability to offer an integrated management dashboard with virtualized systems and oracle DB manager in all DB supported versions.

The machine should have a visual monitoring interface, not also for hardware but also to DB and virtualized hosts.

The following issues need attention:

• I would be happy to see the Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) pre-installed in it instead of installing it in a separate machine.
• The Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) is quite slow. Sometimes the page takes ages to open.
• The shutdown procedure in this box is different from many other servers that I worked with. For example, when you shut down the server, you see the LEDs of the storage part still on, and there is no button for that part to turn the power off. You can only unplug the power socket!

It had a lot of bugs, especially with the old patch bundles. There was no support for connecting it to an FC tape drive for backups.

I would like to see some improvement in the capacity.

It takes too long to implement and Oracle should do something about it. They also need to perform more R&D on new releases before releasing it into the marketplace.

The testing aspect of the solution could be improved. Right now, it's done by us, but if they'd improve it with tools that would make things easier.

If we were able to use Oracle Database to create mobile apps, that would be great. I don't know multiple languages, like Java, etc. I need to learn a separate language, right now in order to do this.

Patching: Oracle Database Appliance patching comes out two to three months after the regular patching cycle.                     .

Creating a VM on ODA could be improved.