Oracle Database

Oracle database is battle tested and has been in the industry for a long time, meaning they have a good understanding of the markets demands.

Oracle database is secure and ensures that user data is not tampered with through prompt updates.

Peer to peer communities are available to help solve almost all problems that one may be facing.

Oracle database documentation is so wide that it may be discouraging to people who don't like reading.

Oracle database is quite expensive and not ideal for companies that are starting up.

The database takes up a lot of space.

Data management: Oracle 12c does a great job in storing, retrieving and processing data.

Performance Management: We make uses of features provided with in Oracle Enterprise Manager as well as SQL tuning capabilities to manage out queries and closely monitor the performance.

Improved support experience compared to older version.

Easy to upgrade and maintain when coupled with the new features and security that is delivered for the most up to date version of Oracle.

Increased need to manage and maintain the databases in terms of performance for our project needs. Causing an overhead for DBAs and Developers.

Even though Oracle 12c has been around for multiple years and supports various features that are provided by other competitors, certain features are still missing.

No ability to perform some advanced analytics from within the database.

Difficulty integrating with non-Oracle products.

Oracle Database is essential for data mining.

Offers cloud services such as Oracle Cloud for storing data.

Oracle has a robust security framework in terms of unauthorised users accessing data.

Can support various operating systems and architecture platforms.

Avail more tutorials

Add a reliable customer care number in the case where one has satisfied all his options at the help desk

Data back up and recovery

Partitioning

Data consolidation

Reliability

Additional learning materials

Additional conferences

Reliable and stable. Over time we have not experienced drops or service interruptions due to a bug or other factors that could be attributed to the database engine.

High availability. We have the solution implemented with Oracle RAC of 2 nodes that gives us greater capabilities to provide the service.

Disaster Recovery. We have a protection of the database through the feature included in the Enterprise version. Oracle Data Guard that allows us to have the primary database in the main city and a copy (contingency database) in another department of the country (65 miles away approx.).

Monitoring with the Cloud Control feature, we have an overview of the health of the primary database with RAC and the secondary database with Oracle Data Guard.

In general, we are satisfied with the Oracle database, the only point that we always have problems with is the licensing with virtualization systems other than Oracle Virtual Machine because it does not take as valid the distribution of cores with other virtualization tools.

Oracle Database may be licensed and deployed on-premises on a choice of platforms

The SQL server was very good to use

There were other tools one could use like TOAD to make debugging easier

Great support

Make Apache more accessible

Improve the cloud storage aspect

Improve mobile computing for Android

The database performs well for transactional and reporting use, even with very large datasets.

There are a wide range of delivered functions available that really help with reporting.

The documentation from Oracle is actually very usable and there are many other expert sources to draw from.

I do not have the technical expertise of a DBA, so I do not know if what I see as limitations are due to the product or our specific implementation.

high performance

mature and reliable

rich in features

can be expensive

big footprint

It scales to handle any size data set that you need.

The tools available to take action on your data are robust.

It is used by organizations so staffing professionals familiar with the product isn't an issue.

Security is a concern for a database project and Oracle provides updates but there are vulnerabilities at any given time.

Cloud solutions are becoming more and more popular and might make hosting your own database solution unnecessary in the future.

Fast

SQL and PL/SQL are very powerful

New releases have very nice features like compression, obfuscation, XML and JSON

License is sometimes is very expensive

A very good DBA is always needed to solve daily issues

Help online

Robust

Scales well

Efficient

Reliable

Runs on a wide range of platforms and hardware

Can be expensive

Licensing can be complicated

Licensing can be confucing, especially in a virtual environment

Speed - Oracle 12c is incredibly fast over very large data sets, the Oracle optimizer allows for complex queries to have results returned very quickly.

Enterprise Dataset size - Oracle 12c is built to handle the needs of a large organization.

Disaster recovery - built-in replication methods and archival allows for easier maintenance for business-critical data.

Oracle 12c SQL Developer is included with the product for no additional licensing cost, but it is much more limited compared to query tools such as TOAD.

Oracle 12c stumbles on certain queries with the optimizer not catching simple methods to return queries very quickly. Often a scalar subquery is required to reduce the time by up to 99%.

On occasion, the optimizer can miss simple changes such as IN ('1','2','3') working but BETWEEN '1' AND '3' being stuck in an infinite loop.

Database delivered across a wide variety of the most popular application developments

Technologies including Oracle APEX, PL/SQL, SQL, C, C++, Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby.

Oracle Database 12c is a single integrated database platform offering market-leading security, high performance, availability, and scalability for online transactions processing, data warehousing and Big Data

New functionality has been added to Oracle Database 12c with a focus on ease of use, security, scalability, and performance.

Grant Roles to PL/SQ Programs Only - In Oracle 11g and earlier versions, whenever you wanted to run a PL/SQL program that accessed a table, you needed to grant access to the user running the program both to the program and the underlying table. This felt a bit strange, because the package was the one accessing the table. And whenever you adjusted the package, you needed to adjust the access to the users.

In Oracle 12c, you can just give access to the user to the PL/SQL package, and not the underlying tables. This makes it easier to administrate and better for security.

APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT - Have you ever been investigating a table and wanted to find out how many records it contains with a simple SELECT COUNT(*) query, but the query took a long time to run? Or, if you wanted to find the number of distinct values in a column, but the query was slow? Well, we now have an easier way to run this query.

A new function, called APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT. This lets you find the approximate number of distinct values in a column. It's called an approximate because it doesn't give you the exact number. But, the number is pretty close.

Row Limiting with the TOP N Clause - One of the most useful features of Oracle 12c is the ability to limit rows easily. This is great for pagination and other similar requirements. In older versions of Oracle, you needed to have one or two nested subqueries with the ROWNUM function. Now, you can just add the new clause to the query and you'll get your results.

An added benefit of performing the migration in Oracle Database 12c is that the new extended VARCHAR2 type limit of 32767 bytes guarantees any VARCHAR2 column with the pre-12.1 limit of 4000 bytes or less can just be lengthened to accommodate longer values resulting from data expanding in conversion to Unicode. Neither truncation nor migration to the CLOB data type is now necessary for such columns.

Virtualized databases - Multi-Tenant is the flagship feature of 12c. It is a wonderful feature, especially in development and testing where everyone wants a copy of exactly how all production databases are structured.

Classic Oracle DB stability - it just works.

Full featured database beyond pur SQL. AQ, Oracle Text, file watcher, XML, JSON, and so on with all the extra technologies one gets with the platform.

The product is complete, but sure there are nice things that could be added. Such as having INSERT be able to write it as column = value instead of first listing columns and then values while having to manually make sure they match up.

Oracle Database is fully compliant with all standard SQL and PL languages. Being standards compliant makes Oracle adoption a breeze.

Oracle offers superior fault tolerance and provides robust audit trails to ensure system integrity is never compromised.

We have noticed that with our implementation of Oracle database the web management console sometimes starts to lag when the database is running its auto-indexing process.

One great feature to have would be the ability to auto generate Java code (POJOs) directly from the database schemas.

Being an Enterprise Database system, Oracle provides a wide range of usage. It is highly configurable and allows well for scalability.

In an Enterprise environment Oracle databases provide full access control and audit trails, thereby ensuring system integrity.

It fully supports standard SQL and PL syntax making it easy for developers to create their own triggers and stored procedures.

Auto generating POJOs from the database schema would be a great help for developers.

The Admin console for the database can be greatly improved by allowing customizable dashboards.

You can now create a table column with a 'generated as identity' clause

In a prior release of Oracle, a column can't be in more than one index. In 12C, we can include a column in a B-tree index as well as a BitMap index.

New SQL syntax to simplify fetching the first few rows

Adaptive Query Optimization and Online Stats Gathering

Give some options for data replication rather than full dependence on oracle golden gate

Easy diagnostic tools which help the users base to understand problem in more simpler way

Optional diagnostics and tuning packs should be part of the database

Pluggable DB & Temporary Undo

Historcal Context variables tracking

Adaptive plan management impacted the performance of a few SQLs. Resetting optimizer version to 11g mitigated risk.

For one of the products we had issues with connection pooling and we had to back out the 12c upgrade within days. Later Oracle released patches though!

Performance at high concurrency

Response times in Exadata

Level of Support

Heterogeneous connectivity

Easy diagnostic tools

Improve b tree index performance with heavy concurrency

Support: an extensive set of tools and resources, whether it's EM, ASH or MOS there's a full set of facilities to help in diagnosing and rectifying problems

High Availability: in particular Data Guard

Active duplication: makes the creation of a standby or a clone for development work a simple task

It is an expensive product and the license [has] implications

Oracle Database has the full features of PL/SQL which means that we can completely unleash the power of stored procedures, triggers and other various complicated database functionalities.

Rollback to previous states is extremely simple.

I believe that the best property of the Oracle Database is that, it can used for simple database storage uses like storing an address book and can also be used for very complicated things like maintaining tax details of a million unique entities. The range of usage is very wide.

The official documentation of Oracle Database is not easy to get used to. There should be a way to convey its use easily to the users.

Adding custom defined permissions for custom defined user types would be a really cool feature which can open up a lot of possibilities.

Improving performance and scalability factors is also a domain to explore for Oracle.

The database appears to be fast and capable based on our benchmarking.

Oracle 12c adds a number of new features compared to older versions. In particular, mutitenant and pluggable databases are attractive options for us for refreshing QA environments and managing sprawl.

Compatibility with prior versions appears to be solid.

My biggest beef with 12c and Oracle in general is the support. Over the years I've seen a significant decline in the quality and responsiveness of the support group.

Oracle has more or less abandoned its Standard Edition user base by adding limitations and restrictions on the product, core use, etc. While our current terminal release 11gR2 SE databases are suitable for our purposes, the 12c SE limitations mean we would be forced to upgrade to 12c EE to match the capacity we presently enjoy. 12c SE is not an option for us.

Punitive licensing for AWS users is a turn off. We have deep roots in AWS and it doesn't make sense for us to engage a second cloud vendor, or move extensive investments in AWS, to the Oracle Cloud.

New adaptive query optimization functionality in this release

Improved the security of data, through transparent data encryption and data redaction

Improved real-time performances through in-memory technology, able to manage also OLTP workload

Improved some Oracle functions (from version 12c release 2)

Added the possibility to automate compression and storage tiering policies, according to the usage of the data

Oracle Enterprise Manager, that goes with the database, has been improved as well as a tool for DBAs

License costs for Oracle Database are pretty high and not affordable at all for some companies

Installation and maintenance of the database is quite difficult (not specifically in this release)

As expected out of an enterprises level database, Oracle DB supports wide availability to application development, through database connection options whether it be by a direct or cloud connection.

Oracle DB can support distributed applications, which provides support to cloud based users and application. As well as large data sets needed in data warehousing which is great for data mining.

Oracle DB may not be the best choice for every application or business. Oracle has a high price point and if you are not taking advantage of the enterprise level features, high users count, or big data - Oracle DB may not be the best choice. To this end, Oracle Database Lite, PostgreSQL or another DB may be a better choice. Personally, I have not heard much of Oracle Database Lite - most people think of Oracle DB as the big player and do not consider it or hear about it for smaller uses.

Oracle Database Lite may be limited to mobile architecture. A slimmed down version of Oracle DB with core DB features to compete in smaller server applications would be greatly desired.

Backup and restore using various methods

Performance tuning

You can incrementally add options that you need (like Spatial, Partitioning, Compression, Security, RAT etc)

Oracle Support (some support engineers are very good and some are not very good)

Licensing cost for Enterprise Edition needs to be brought down so that more startups can use the product