Oracle Database Reviews

Cloudera Hadoop provides the scalable data architecture organizations need to manage increasing data volumes, though not the intuitive GUI for business users. Oracle Big Data Discovery (BDD) provides business users the ability to explore and analyze that Hadoop cluster to uncover data of interest.

The scalable data storage of Hadoop is the most critical feature, but without Oracle Big Data Discovery that data is difficult for business users to access without significant IT support. BDD relies on Spark and Hive to function so those are the next most valuable features of Cloudera Hadoop for me.

Using Oracle Endeca Information Discovery has enabled our clients to search and explore unstructured data so they can answer unexpected questions as soon as they come up. This has been a game changer since it dramatically reduces the delay when new data volumes are introduced, or when new business questions are identified and need to be answered.

Hadoop as a big data repository is difficult for non-technical users to access but provides a potential gold mine of data insight. Oracle Big Data Discovery's ability to let business users explore that large volume of data gives them a significant advantage.

Oracle Big Data Discovery allows business users to interact with data in Hadoop and to transform it into a different format on the Hadoop cluster. This proprietary format can sit within the Hadoop cluster, but is not fault tolerant and query load is not distributed using native Hadoop technologies.

The more BDD can leverage those technologies the more robust and responsive it’s analytics will be. The second point is that when users identify and transform data of interest they do so directly, meaning they do not need to wait on IT development. However, the transformations are not especially complex.

Leveraging R at some point as a user drive interface within Oracle Big Data Discovery would allow them to do more advanced data analysis. Currently this depends on Hadoop programming which is not a technical barrier, but is not accessible to business users.

There are some details around BDD's configuration that should be improved as the product is refined. The main technical constraint is that Oracle Big Data Discovery is designed to work with subsets of the data on Hadoop. Although the record numbers can be increased it’s performance is impacted.

This means if you have one billion records in your Hadoop cluster, you might still only ingest a few million for analysis at a time. The positive thing is that analysis can be throwaway so you can do this multiple times.

I've used BDD for more or less six months, since v1.0 was released. Its predecessor, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery I've used for approximately four years. Cloudera Hadoop, which I've used for just over a year, sits underneath Oracle Big Data. This product provides business users with a web browser interface to the Hadoop cluster which I think is a critical gap in the Hadoop offering. BDD leverages Hive and Spark to provide users with the ability to search, explore, and visualize data from a Hadoop cluster. This is the area we are most engaged with as a professional services company.

Oracle Big Data Discovery depends on either Cloudera or Hortonworks Hadoop which are both stable and scalable base deployments.

As with most big corporations engaging with Oracle on technical support can be challenging. As a new product that seems to have a higher priority hopefully their support and development of Big Data Discovery will improve from what it was with Endeca Information Discovery.

Tableau as a tool for business users to visualize data is very popular, but the ability of Oracle Big Data Discovery to provide built in text enrichment, native support for unstructured data, and a very robust engine for search gave it some advantages to support data discovery that superseded the strengths of Tableau for data visualization. Solr provided excellent search, but not the same ease of support for text enrichment or interactive visualizations.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward, but as a new product in the market the support community is not very evolved so only a few organizations possess any real product knowledge.

As a professional service company implementation work on client sites is done by us. Regardless of who does the implementation, be sure it aligns to how your organization strategically intents to use the product. And be prepared to include training as part of the implementation to enable your target audience to take advantage of it.

Licensing costs are currently very competitive as Oracle looks to establish a market presence for BDD. Organizations that are not seeing tremendous return value on their Hadoop investment or are struggling with accessibility should take advantage of the early pricing options.

Aim to roll it out to a large cross section of your business users and structure the procedures to encourage throwaway analytics. Creating traditional dashboards and static reporting can be done with it, but this depends on the structure which makes them inherently inflexible to change. The strengths of Hadoop to store unstructured data and the ability of it to explore, search, and visualize that data means users can be rapidly exploring their data.

Its reliability and security are the features most valuable for us. We know we can depend on it and that it keep our data secure.

It's also a ubiquitous solution. It seems that OBD is everywhere. I know that knowing how to use it in one company will help me in my career at another company.

The biggest improvement to our organization is from a security perspective. It just keeps all our data safe as an integral part of the company. It's our go-to database solution.

Although we're not using the latest version, there are some ODB tools that are quite cumbersome to use. For example, we often use the standard backup tool and have found it to be pretty cryptic. It's needs improvement in usability as it takes a lot of effort to use.

We've been using it since 1992.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's stable. We haven't had any issues with instability.

We don't. I know it does, but we don't. We are a pretty small shop. Our data's small, so not really.

This is one of our favorite things about ODB. The support is pretty good.

I used another database and data storage system as a developer in a prior role.

It's a very complex product, and it takes a lot of skill and experience to implement it. It's a lot easier now, but back then it was like 75 floppy disks for setup.

Consider an open source solution as well.

We are using Oracle Database for financial applications.

One of the most valuable aspects of Oracle Database is the maturity of the solution.

I have been using Oracle Database for approximately five years.

Oracle Database is a highly stable solution.

The workloads of Oracle Database are scalable.

We have approximately 50 people using the solution. We do have plans to increase the number of users but not at the moment.

The support from Oracle is fairly good. They have knowledge-based articles that you can consult before you need their direct support, we're happy with the support.

The initial setup of the Oracle Database is straightforward. However, it does require some skills and knowledge. The process takes approximately two hours.

We used two internal engineers for the implementation of the Oracle Database.

The Oracle Database licensing price could be less expensive. We pay annually for the use of the solution.

We are happy with Oracle Database.

I rate Oracle Database a right out of ten.

I made personal use of the solution for my projects. Customers use it as a database to store and retrieve information. 

The solution could have better security and integration. 

We have been using Oracle Database for a couple of months.

The solution is scalable.

I have never contacted tech support. 

We did not use another solution prior to Oracle Database, although we do use MySQL. 

The solution is easy to install, although I don't recall how long this took. 

There are no licensing costs because the solution for me is open source. 

The solution is cloud-based. 

I would recommend it to others. 

I rate Oracle Database as an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution based on the requirements of a client.

We primarily use it for a client that has a huge amount of data and has another application that also has lots of data. It's very good at handling jobs that have huge datasets.  

I'm not a regular user of the solution.

It's a great product overall.

The initial setup isn't too difficult.

The product does have a lot of features. However, I've barely explored them.

The main issue with Oracle is the maintenance required. They should work to make it less maintenance-heavy. This is especially true if you are using it on Linux. You need more experience and skills in order to maintain it on Linux in general.

We've had corruption occur if the power gets cut off. We had a bad experience with some cases. However, this might have been due to our own infrastructure issues that have since been dealt with.

We've used the solution for three or four years.

The solution isn't widely used by our company. I'm the only one testing it. The people in our company don't use Oracle at all.

I've never directly dealt with technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. Whenever I have a problem or issue, I google it and search for answers online. 

While I don't have much personal experience, my understanding is that the initial setup isn't too difficult. It's pretty simple and straightforward.

In our organization, we don't use Oracle, aside from in labs. We use Oracle in our labs just for testing and connectivity. We have versions of Oracle in our labs and other SQL devices.

We don't really use the solution too much in the company and therefore don't have a license. We test it for customers. I can't speak to the licensing process or costs. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's mostly been a positive experience, working with the product.

Between Oracle and SQL, I would recommend SQL to other users and companies. 

We are a system integrator and Oracle Database is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We have good knowledge when it comes to Oracle integrations.

There are many use cases but it is most often used for specific software development projects, such as portals. We have some enterprise portals, for example, and it is also useful for self-service applications such as payments or other requests.

It is often used for information systems.

The most valuable feature is that it is a complete product with all of the functionality that you need, and there is no need for any special features.

We have been working with Oracle Database for a couple of years.

We have approximately 10 customers who are using Oracele.

Technical support is perfect.

The installation is quite straightforward. As long as you follow the proper process, there is no problem with it. Typically, it takes three or four hours to deploy.

For security aspects, our customers prefer an on-premises deployment over a cloud-based one.

We have two database administrators who are responsible for maintenance. One is a senior-level engineer and the other is a junior.

Our customers sometimes complain about the price of the license, as it is very high for them.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The powerful SQL language for working with, analyzing and manipulating lots of data. The concurrency and consistency model that allows many simultaneous users with little or no locking. The extensibility using PL/SQL and Java to extend legacy application with modern features like webservices via the database.

Rewriting legacy procedural modules to SQL with analytic functions has on several occasions turned multi-hour jobs into few-minute jobs. High concurrency enables sales persons in shops to service customers swiftly with no waiting even on peak days with several sales per second. Even though legacy application cannot interface with external services, the database is capable of doing so, which enables the business to get new ideas without thinking of technological hindrances.

There's not much - new features come along in every version helping to keep up with
technological advances. There are some small technical issues such as support forwindowing clause in LISTAGG function and a few similar small issues in SQL. There are a few nice-to-have extensions, like allowing external table syntax on the content of a CLOB.

I've used it since 1996.

Some of the time, a Real Application Cluster version was used, which turned out on very rare occasions to performed unmotivated failover to other node. The problem really was sub-optimal coding of the legacy application in the use of the locking methods of Oracle, which was magnified when propagating locks to other nodes, however would have been nice if RAC could have handled it, even when sup-optimal. After switching some years ago to a single server non-RAC solution, the database has been rock steady - only instabilities was when O/S or hardware failed, not the database.

Highly knowledgeable and competent tech support - once you get past the first level and get the case assigned to the right people. However, it can take quite a bit of time to explain details to first level support and gather debug and log information, that in some cases aren't necessarily relevant but is merely correct procedure in order to get the case assigned. On the other hand, many key Oracle people engage in the community, so a finicky question about a PL/SQL detail might get attention and answers from product managers themselves.

Before 1996 we used a legacy application, but it would locked on a table level. That meant practically no concurrency, for example phone sales people could not enter order data while talking to the customer but wrote on paper. Then one guy would enter all orders later. After a demonstration of Oracle database giving high concurrency, it was very easy for my boss to decide to buy Oracle.

An external consultant was hired for the setup and there was no trouble with the database setup. The legacy application needed a bit extra setting up to get it to run properly with Oracle, but that was not the fault of Oracle.

Bargain with the sales representative for good discounts - particularly if you buy several licences at once. But beware when buying multiple licenses together you get them on a single CSI, which may give trouble in future if you need to cancel one license out of the total, as that in principle means cancelling all licences and renegotiating so you may get new prices with less discount on the yearly support fees for the licences you have left. Research all the things that actually is possible with the basic licence so you get your value-for-money and only pay for options if you really need them.

There weren't many options at the time. A database supported by the legacy application had to be chosen, and the native legacy database just wasn't up to concurrency demands as described above, so Oracle was the other choice.

Oracle database can do many things that you may think it is necessary to supplement with other products. Look into how you may use all of the features to get value-for-money - then it might turn out in the long run to be cheaper than having to integrate multiple products.

For us, the most valuable features of Database have been its robustness, reliability, and the fact that it's highly tuneable.

It also allows us to support large applications and to also tune them properly. Database really provides us with great performance and stability.

I really wish that Oracle had included pluggable databases in the 12c Enterprise Edition. I can understand not putting it into the Standard Edition, but it should be included in the Enterprise Edition at no additional cost.

My other gripe is their licensing practices of the database engine. If I run a VMware infrastructure, and a lot of people do, Oracle makes me pay for licenses for the entire farm. It's very expensive and I don't think it's fair that they'd charge for it.

I've been using Oracle Database for twenty-five years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's way better now than it used to be, but, yes, it is very stable. All of our large applications use Database because of its stability.

The scalability of Database is good. I do have to say, however, that SQL Server for the Database engine is better if you want to run a bunch of small databases. My gripe about 12c is that they will make you pay extra for it even if you've already licensed Enterprise Edition. Also, it's not as easy to tune the pluggables because the underlying infrastructure is non-tuneable. Whereas with SQL Server, there's a little more flexibility. I run both engines: my SQL Server databases are for my little stovepipe stuff and my Oracle Database is for my big, enterprise-level stuff.

In my experience, technical support is really good, as well as the knowledge base. With the KB, I'm usually able to find the answers myself. And, Oracle has automated it to the point where it's very intuitive and helpful. I would, however, like to be able to call someone if needed like I used to. I remember having to wait for long period of time, but it's nice to talk to a person who can help.