Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is Oracles's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform which combines the utility of public cloud with the granular control, security, and predictability of on-premises infrastructure.
We use Azure for most of company deployments, since we use Microsoft stack, but since we also use Oracle databases we were able to test OCI and compare the usage. I use OCI to test new features and solutions.
As per our usage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for almost 6 years hosting 500 + customers I can say its well suited application for any small scale to larger scale application as it can handle that capacity and provide more reliable cloud service only if you need any messaging service like pub/sub or sqs better to consider other services.
Microsoft SQL is ubiquitous, while MySQL runs under the hood all over the place. Microsoft SQL is the platform taught in colleges and certification courses and is the one most likely to be used by businesses because it is backed by Microsoft. Its interface is friendly (well, as pleasant as SQL can be) and has been used by so many for so long that resources are freely available if you encounter any issues.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a generous free tier, moreso than other hyperscalers, with an always-free tier that guarantees certain products are always free
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows you to size VMs with differing combinations of CPU and RAM, which is contrary to other hyperscalers that have specific pre-defined combinations only
Navigating the UI takes lots of getting used to. It reminds me of older GCP (just to get used to where everything is).
Permission for different things always seemed to be more difficult than it really needed to be. Once you got them set up you were good but updating anything or creating new permissions for just about anything took longer than I thought it should.
Based on how the buttons were laid out, it was pretty easy to delete all of your DNS records, and backing them up was not as intuitive as I'd like with the UI, but it was easy to do using a script.
Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition has a high cost but is the only edition which supports SQL Always On Availability Groups. It would be nice to include this feature in the Standard version.
Licensing of Microsoft SQL Server is a quite complex matter, it would be good to simplify licensing in the future. For example, per core vs per user CAL licensing, as well as complex licensing scenarios in the Cloud and on Edge locations.
It would be good to include native tools for converting Oracle, DB2, Postgresql and MySQL/MariaDB databases (schema and data) for import into Microsoft SQL Server.
Reliability: Very dependable and stable OCI services have been for the business operations.Performance: The speed and efficiency of OCI in meeting their computing and storage needs.Scalability: The ease and effectiveness of scaling resources up or down to accommodate changing demands.Security: The robustness and effectiveness of OCI's security features in protecting their data and applications.
We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
The services & products in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure needs more improvement to beat other Cloud service providers. The price is good & Security processes are good. We are requiring to put more effort in supporting this Oracle Cloud Infrastructure than other Cloud service providers. Probably better ways are there but is not super easy to find or not super available
SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Yeah sometimes we had to face unplanned outages due to underlying infrastructure issues, so not every time,e but once in a while we face issues with availability. But the good thing is we have redundancy with DR setup and multi region so we can manage.
From the start, I was surprised by response times and image quality accessing windows VMs with RDP. GCP, Azure and -many offerings in AWS- don't perform this speed. Also, that's evident in the quality of Infrastructure Management Team, because I just received one warning regarding a region failure, what confirms that's a mature platform.
Overall it is amazing, there is always room for improvement. We have weekly updates that tend to slow the program used more and more. We had to change some reports within Oracle because the others wouldn’t load. This is tied to our payroll and the delays are causing many time constraint issues and panic. We have to create a new report when one breaks. Otherwise awesome!
We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
We used Microsoft Azure and Docker earlier and faced some difficulties like Microsoft Azure and Docker. Occasionally, the generation of large images can delay deployment. It is also necessary for me to admit that Microsoft Azure and Docker have a somewhat steep learning curve. Proper paperwork needs to be there. Docker has issues with performance on a number of platforms. On the other hand, OCI is easy to deploy and easy to understand.
[Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
was not part of initial purchase team. Anyways, i think unit pricing and billing frequency is good compared to other Cloud service providers, when it comes to Cloud Capital expenditure & Operational expenditure. Would be more interested in exploring more options where customers can get more cost relaxations on trying out new cloud services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for example a new App or a feature
We have hosted around 500 + customers on this cloud so till day not faced any major issues, so we can use it for any kind of products and it can hold the load and easily scale based on need.
Services & Infra wise is ok to use & host applications & services. Security wise also good for a Cloud service provider. It is a interesting area to explore & using it for day to day needs can be further improvised in future probably. Modern day Services like AI and Machine learning could be improved
Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting.
Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports.
Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives.
