Oracle Database Reviews

One of the features that stands out to me is the Real Application Cluster. This gives us the ability to have active-active clustering functionality. We can scale horizontally to multiple database servers and instances, which gives us both High Availability and load balancing, great features both.

There's also the new In-Memory feature that allows us to do a lot of OLAP transactions.

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Database is rock solid, which, of course, affects our ability to do work and provide customer service. We're a mutual fund company, so stability is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. Oracle Database really gives us this key factor from an IT perspective.

We'd like to see a few more security improvements. Security right now is a very, very big issue. Oracle is doing a very good job with security enhancements with each now releases, the latest of which, I think, is 12c release 2. But I'd really like for it to have a lot more security enhancements that are added to Database, rather than pushing the enhancements into some of their other tools that you have to buy in order to be able to take advantage of those enhancements and functionalities. Like I said, security really is key for us as we do a lot of encryption, so it would be best if the additional security features and enhancements were part of Database rather than part of some other product we'd have to buy.

Deploying it was no problem. We had no issues with it at all.

Stability is not an issue at all. Oracle is a database company and Database, as their flagship RDBMS, is the product at the highest level of maturity.

It's scaled to our needs.

We have premier support from Oracle, so we have a very good relationship with technical support.

It's the most mature Oracle product, so setting up the RDBMS was straightforward.

Despite the fact that it's the most expensive of the RDBMS solution available, there's a reason why Oracle Database has the largest market share. It's the best there is. If there's another RDBMS vendor that provides some functionality that Oracle doesn't, then you'd really have to evaluate what your true ROI will be. From my perspective, though, Database is worth it.

We are using the Oracle E-Business Suite ERP system and the backend of that application is Oracle Database. We are using the customer care and billing application and the backend of that application is also Oracle Database. 

The customer care and billing capabilities are very good.

It is very stable. We are getting good performance from it. The reliability is excellent. 

It's one of the leading databases on the market.

We get good support on the database side. 

The cloud setup is very simple. 

The solution works well for enterprise-level organizations.

We've used the solution for so long, it would be hard to switch off of it. 

On the ERP side, they do not seem to be improving the on-premises version. They seem to want to push the cloud option on users. The roadmap for each seems to be diverting, and the on-premises side simply isn't getting the same amount of attention.

The pricing could be high.

In our company, we've been working with the solution here for 15 years.

The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. We do not find that it crashes or freezes. It's reliable.

The scalability is very good. They are providing the structure, the architecture, and everything you need to scale. It's very easy to scale to whatever size you need. Usually, we can do scalable sites with no issue.

Technical support is okay for the most part. On the database sites, things are okay. However, if we talk about the application sites, sometimes we are getting a response time that is delayed.

The initial setup, for the cloud implementation, is very straightforward. Companies won't have any issues with the deployment. 

The solution is very expensive as they are charging their products in different categories. For example, we have to pay on the application side, on the technology side, and on the licensing. On an enterprise level, if we compare with other solutions, there are a lot of open-source options which would be cheaper.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I'd rate it at a perfect ten if the could and on-premises versions we treated with equal weight, and they didn't try to simply push cloud on users. 

On the enterprise level, it's very stable and reliable. It's great if users are looking for enterprise quality. However, there are options available in the Unix and Linux systems as well. 

My use case is a lot of banking solutions. Data sometimes is static in nature, but in a majority of the cases, it is dynamic as well. Oracle database is a focalization database.

Oracle Database has good performance dynamics with respect to oncoming data and fetching of data which gets loaded. All of the same processes are done by a system database administrator or even user initiated financials.

I've found performance streaming to be a valuable feature.

It is also a stable and scalable solution.

It is easy to install and easy to use as well.

They need to work on non-relational data a bit more. If Oracle Database can support non-relational data streaming, it would be great.

Pricing could be improved as well.

I've been using it for more than 10 years.

As for the stability of this solution, it's a hundred percent reliable.

Scalability differs depending on the schema created in Oracle Database to access the database artifacts. For example, in a normal recessional database, which does not have much centralized or decentralized schema, scalability can be very high. However, in cases where there is a centralized schema, the scalability has to be defined by the database administrator.

Our whole engineering team currently uses this solution.

On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate technical support at 9.5.

The initial setup is very straightforward, and Oracle Database is very easy to use.

The licensing is on a monthly basis. Improvement in pricing would be nice.

When you are into domains such as NIC, BFSI, retail, and account switching, then Oracle Database is definitely your best option. There are some aspects of Oracle Database that need improvement, but it can still be considered a good solution.

All in all, I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

The most valuable feature is how evolved the solution is right now. It's been around for a while, and I think it's been servicing a lot of different use cases. I think it's really stabilized, evolved, and you can actually put it to use in multiple scenarios. It adapts itself just as well to most business use cases.

I think the best part about Oracle is it keeps evolving. It's not adding any more features to it. There's a big move toward custom cloud services - big databases in the cloud - and obviously there are people with apprehensions in terms of what will happen if that data is shared. They are working towards addressing that issue. They are kind of compartmentalized, and kind of made some of the domains private, to maintain the security for certain critical domains. You still have the power of using the cloud. That's the great thing about it: It keeps evolving. It doesn't stay still. It's very compelling.

It also provides reliability, in terms of handling large volumes of data. I don't believe there's another database server that people would pick. Given a choice, everybody would like to go with Oracle.

I think those are the two big features that really stick out.

It has definitely improved the way my organization functions. It's our database management tool. We have a lot of sensitive information. Different business verticals have a lot of sensitive information that they want to reliably preserve somewhere, and also be able to call back upon in a very secure manner. Oracle does just that.

At the same time, it has a lot of the algorithms where it tries to optimize itself in terms of how fast you can get the data out, and also how fast you can write to it as well. I think it's definitely improved and provides benefits to the industry; not just for the gaming industry that I'm part of, but generally for all verticals in the business world. As I’ve mentioned, it’s the database of choice for most business verticals.

I’d like to see them include a certain amount of intuitiveness in the optimization of the queries, and the algorithms for that could be better. There's still room for improvement in those areas.

One of the things that is also mentioned about Oracle is that with the RAC architecture, the storage is shared, and that sometimes becomes contentional. It's not so much the processing on the nodes; it's the data processing that becomes a point of contention sometimes – if they could do something so we can customize the RAC in some way, and also implement sharing, something along the lines of what Perl OOP has, where the storage is also exclusive to the nodes. I'm sure something like that can be brought in. Having mentioned that, I'm pretty sure they're already researching into it. That's something from my experience that can be improved.

I don't think you would pick another database for stability; for financial data, or anything related to money transactions, where you want to reliably store data, and you don't want to lose any data. You don't want to try to save something in the database and then go in the next day and not have it, obviously. Oracle is right up there in terms of stability.

Obviously, the scalability factor was increased with the Oracle Real Application Clusters (RACs). You have multiple instances of Oracle, with the shared storage, so you can spawn multiple processes to do large volume data lifting. You don't want to rely on one instance alone. You don't want to load that one node alone. It can do everything. You can spread it across nodes. The RAC solution gives you that.

In terms of the data scalability itself, if you don't want a shared storage, you have solutions such as Exadata. It provides very good storage and gives you great performance.

In all respects, Oracle on all fronts is doing great, including scalability. I don't see any issues with it right now. As I’ve mentioned, the great thing about the product is that it keeps evolving and tries to improve.

I think it's great to have those features.

Technical support is a little sketchy. It depends on who you get on any particular day. Oracle is a worldwide organization, so I guess there are certain sections that are not really well covered, in terms of building up a knowledgebase, and trying to go back and see how a problem was solved in the past, which should be an easy thing to do.

I think sometimes it comes down to doing that: going back, looking at the issue you are reporting, determining whether you've faced it before, and what the solution was. If there isn't a solution and if this issue hasn't been reported earlier, then be intuitive about it. That part was missing in the few instances where I've had the opportunity to call support.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s a worldwide organization. They're available around the clock, covering different time zones. All those aspects are covered. I think a little more intuitiveness in the solutioning for the support issues would go a long way in improving the experience.

We previously used plenty of solutions. Oracle was an easy choice. If cost is not a constraint, I would recommend Oracle ten times out of ten.

Setup is never straightforward. It's a pretty complex piece. I have actually overseen it, but it's mainly the database administrators, the DBAs, who actually worked on it. They do come back and work closely with us architects and engineers, in terms of how to best configure the infrastructure.

I wouldn't say that it is straightforward, but at the same time, it's been done so many times, there are so many use cases to fall back on. I'm pretty sure that if you get stuck somewhere, you will get the knowledge base, go back and get past that issue that you're facing at that moment.

It's all down to being so evolved. Oracle has been around for a while, so you have those benefits.

We moved from another solution, knowing the history of Oracle. We earlier conceptualized to be on Informix. Informix was one of the options we really considered. There wasn't much of innovation happening in Informix. It was more legacy. I think that is a reason why we moved to another database system that is more active with more innovation covering different aspects: scalability, data volume management and those kinds of things. At that point, Informix was definitely the only other option. Subsequently, we looked at other solutions such as MySQL for cost purposes, but having explored each of those, they don't really match up with Oracle for me; the scalability, the data volume management, those features, along with the reliability. There's a lot of hand-holding support that needs to go into those products to be able to match what Oracle offers.

In terms of data security and reliability, if that is of paramount importance, I would definitely suggest Oracle. If cost becomes a factor, in terms of the licensing models I’ve mentioned, then probably I would recommend a cheaper solution - maybe even open source - but that comes with a tradeoff of the data not being reliable.

For financial institutions, financial organizations, you would not want to put your data at risk. I think it's tradeoff with those aspects when making your choice.

The most important criteria when I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle are the support and licensing. I look at the licensing model, in terms of whether there are certain things that they can do to support a company like ours, who've been engaging with them for so long. We have different business models. If they can offer some licensing options that would be more attractive to meet those business models, maybe offer some innovative solutions, that's something that I would look for.

In terms of the support aspects I’ve already mentioned, there are specific business use cases we're trying to solve, and not just rely on the knowledge base that's already accumulated.

Those are some of the things I look for.

We use Oracle Database to run applications. We use it for our clients' databases and applications.

Whenever a client has problems or requires new implementations, they approach us. We provide training and coaching with application implementations. Currently, one such implementation is underway in the UK.

The product is very stable. We use it for supporting applications, including data warehousing.

The solution could be cheaper and adopt AI space.

I have been using Oracle Database for 25 years.

The product is stable.

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

The solution’s scalability is good. It caters to small and medium enterprises with different products and ranges.

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

Technical support could get better.

Neutral

The initial setup is quite simple. We mostly use the installation pack and code pack. Our setup includes a script center, shell scripts, and commercial Java courses.

The product is expensive.

We use database clusters for different clients depending on the SLA. We use Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Advanced Compression. We use These specific options for various clients; however, the selection depends on the client's needs.

We have robust protection measures that are ensured using encryption technologies such as Transparent Database Encryption provided by Oracle. These features are available across all our database offerings, and we have implemented them for our clients accordingly.

We are heavily involved in AI development, and eventually, our products are tailored to fit into the AI space seamlessly.

Integrations are pretty transparent based on the type of solutions and the specific customer requirements. Customer relations between Oracle products are typically straightforward, whereas integrating with third-party products may present some challenges.

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

We have deployed Oracle Database on-premise hardware and on-premise cloud.

Oracle Database is used as a database for various applications. We are using it for a lot of our warehouses.

Oracle Database is the most widely accepted database, and it has built-in technical and security capabilities. It supports the new object in the database. The performance and security are very good, and it is user-friendly. There are a lot of people trained to use this solution which makes it simple to find assistance.

Oracle Database could improve by making migration less difficult and having better integration. For example, having the ability to communicate, using native features, to different databases. Mostly connectivity to different databases, such as open-source databases or any other database.

I have been using Oracle Database since it was version 3 and they are on version 17. It has been a long time.

The stability of the Oracle Database is very good.

Oracle Database is scalable.

Everyone in our organization is using the solution. We have approximately 2,000 users using it directly or indirectly. We have developers, DBAs, system administrators, business analytics people, auditors, and regular users. Additionally, applications are using the database.

I rate the support from Oracle Database a three out of five.

The initial setup of the Oracle Database was straightforward. 

If Oracle Database was for a new customer or a new installation, I'm not sure, how difficult it is since we have been doing the implementation for approximately 30 years. For us, it's very easy. We are used to the software.

The price of Oracle Database could improve, it is expensive and they are paid annually. We are looking for lower pricing and flexible pricing plans, they are very rigid in the price.

I rate the price of Oracle Database a two out of five.

My advice would be for others to use the cloud version of this solution. Do not deploy it on-premise, and deploy them on the containers. Using containers, not directly on the infrastructure, then it makes it very easy, scalable, and more flexible to move around.

I rate Oracle Database an eight out of ten.

We use Oracle Database for our ERP systems mainly because we provide IFS for customers and the IFS utilizes Oracle Database. We generally don't use other Oracle tools because of a bad experience with an R&D project in the past where we had to find the best solution for AI/neural network platforms.

We assessed using Oracle for these AI platforms, but we had plenty of problems with the proper setup of the test version of Oracle Cloud. Frankly speaking, we stopped testing and using Oracle in this R&D project and switched to other tools that are simpler to setup and simpler to understand the pricing. No one was sure how much would have to be paid for the platform to support our AI requirements such as natural language recognition and other things.

Because of these factors, we have essentially stopped using the other Oracle tools and we now only use Oracle Database for the ERP systems that we run for ourselves and for our customers. For this purpose, we use Oracle as a permanent database that is situated on-premises. We have quite a wide range of versions of Oracle Database amongst ourselves and our customers because many of them are older installations that are still operating. In all, there are about 10,000 users of Oracle Database throughout our customers, and perhaps 2,000 users in my organization.

Oracle is a good database with decent performance, which is fortunate because we are required to use this database for our ERP system. Even if we thought Oracle was the worst database in the world, we would still have to use it.

In my opinion, the pricing of all the additional tools that Oracle provides is very complicated. The pricing model is very unfriendly for the user, and for the web vendors.

When it comes to new features, we don't desire anything at this moment. We are completely dependent on this ERP system which we provide and we only need the tools from Oracle that our ERP system needs, and nothing more. Our only concern is the performance of the database. If Oracle could make the performance better on low-end hardware, that would be nice. 

I have been using Oracle Database for 10 years. 

As far as I know, we have no problems with stability.

The scalability is good.

There have been no issues with their technical support. As I am aware, we have had issues in the past, especially with servers and other things, but today there are no special issues or problems. Everything is quite well-addressed by Oracle, in my opinion.

The setup of the Oracle database for an ERP system is generally quite simple. There are specific installation steps that are completely scripted by the ERP system, so you simply have to do everything the documentation asks you to do, and that's all. There's nothing special or super difficult about it and we are generally able to install a database within a day.

We mainly use a special license for ERP systems specifically, instead of a general purpose license. This ERP-focused license is very simple. You just have to use Oracle Database with an ERP system and that's it.

As databases go, Oracle Database is quite a good database with decent performance, and I think that's all there needs to be said.

I would rate it an eight 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.