Oracle Database

Growth capability- Will allow you to grow and upgrade from std to enterprise edition as needed for functionality

Security options available

Enterprise level product

Can be pricing if run on commodity servers when you don't need full capacity because of licensing

Std Edition has limited features and often needs to be upgraded to Enterprise edition

Can be complicated to install properly

The query execution and optimization engine are just great in Oracle. A simple "Explain Plan" statement will give a thorough analysis of the query execution plan.

We store huge amount of data in our Oracle database, if we partition well and plan the loads correctly, the database is very fast and provides top performance.

For us to represent a persona and its relations is more convenient using a graph database rather than a relational DB like Oracle.

Oracle DB is a little more expensive than the other comparable products out there in the market. It will help if the licensing costs are reduced.

High performance.

Robust.

Excellent support for all kinds of integration.

Documentation needs to be better.

Compatibility.

Costs.

Oracle 12c offers many new features that are performing well. Online partitioning has been a large benefit that was not offered in past versions.

From a larger perspective, I think that Oracle 12c Database offers better performance than Microsoft SQL Server does.

Oracle 12c allows the ability to restore just one table via RMAN and that allows us to save time.

Oracle 12c has some slight differences from version 12.1 to 12.2 that have forced us to recode or alter DDL to allow the same features to work.

I wish that RMAN would error out at the beginning instead of the end when there are version discrepancies.

Autonomous database

Exadata

RAC

Big data

Data Analytics

ERP

Large set of data can be stored & retrieved easily

Cloud based so can retrieve from anywhere, anytime

Difficult for beginners to learn

Not optimized for low performance systems

License is expensive

Oracle Database Security - #1 on market - Database Vault, Transparent-Data-Encryption (TDE), Audit Vault, Label Security, User Security, Fine Grain Auditing, SQL Injection, Network Encryption, Virtual Private Database (VPD), and etc.

RMAN backup/restore.

Oracle CPU patching - A nightmare to manually deploy it to every single database every quarter.

In OEM, there are limited functionalities for SQL server.

SID limited to 8 characters.

Redundancy and High Availability via grid setup has a proven track record in securing data availability across applications

Speed of data access across the network is another critical point in which Oracle consistently outperformed others

Support from Oracle is another reason for clients to keep Oracle databases

Oracle databases have started coming in different flavors, from express to enterprise, but a consolidated management tool that can cater to an enterprise can be improved.

I believe other users have reviewed the pros already. I am addressing only the Cons of 12c R2.

SYSAUX tablespace grows rapidly. I didn't need to add space to SYSAUX last a few years in 11g. But after upgrading to 12c R2 12.2.0.1, SYSAUX grows daily, and I have to add space to SYSAUX regularly, about every 2 weeks. I am currently opening an Oracle SR and working with Oracle Support on this issue.

Some of our small databases only use about 5GB excluding SYSAUX. But SYSAUX uses 5GB alone!

Almost all universities (if not all) in the USA have been using Banner application. But Banner app users fail to log on 12c Release 2 databases after upgrading to 12c R2 from 11g because of an Oracle Bug related to password-protected profile. I applied an interim bug to work around this issue. However, since Oct 2018, the PSU patching will not work. I must rollback the interim bug, and then patch the PSU, and then apply the interim patch again to resolve the Oracle bug. I asked Oracle to include the interim in the PSU in Oct 2018. But up to PSU Jul 2019, Oracle didn't implement it yet!

Reliability.

Performance.

Scalability.

It's hard to set up in different environments.

Data Consistency

Slow Availability

First of all DB needs to be upgraded to Oracle 12c for support prospective from Oracle.

Oracle 12 has some great features with respect to auditing.

Keeping the data with respect to hot and cold rows is also a great features helping in managing data well.

It had installation issues where it needed to have a patch applied before installation could begin. Downloaded software should have been tested before providing it to the user.

Oracle 12.1 was not very stable so we had to migrate it to 12.2 after some time.

Speed

Security

Up-time

Usability

Ease of use

Setup

Complex engine with powerful flexibility.

Recoverable at the lowest level.

Works worldwide.

SQL plus rendition like in Windows environments.

Ease of use

SQL syntax is robust

Reliable

Easy to manage and maintain.

Backup and cloning to development instances are easy.

Restoring a full database or a particular table is easy.

Performance was better compared to 11gR2.

Oracle LOBs is still an issue.

Function-based indexes are still a problem

Query optimization needs improvement.

Oracle allows you to connect to multiple reporting tools.

Oracle has extensive patches and distributes them in a timely manner when they release them.

They can handle multiple databases and hold tons of data history.

It is very reliable and doesn't crash like other products.

SQL Developer lacks functionality that would be useful, like displaying all records at once when you query

SQL Developer crashes a lot and it is buggy. We would love to use it more but it is hard to use at times.

They haven't or don't release Oracle Data tools for Visual Studio 2019. We are almost at the end of the year 2019 and still no data tools yet.

Connection to .NET is kind of complicated and not very easy as compared to Microsoft SQL Server that allows you to connect easier.

Oracle, in general, doesn't compare in terms of use with SQL Server. Data takes a little bit longer to get pulled when you create .Net applications.

Connections have to be opened and closed or else you can end up with multiple connections open. As opposed to SQL Server where it opens the connection and it is closed immediately with very little code.

Oracle doesn't provide many examples of how Oracle implements and interacts with .NET.

Recovery. Recovering the database is more reliable than any other I know of.

Speed and performance.

Reliable.

Querying large amounts of data, fast.

Recovery of a database to a point in time needs to be easier.

The database is extremely fast compared to other databases we evaluated.

Queries can be easily diagnosed with different toolsets that Oracle provides. You need to have experience to read it, but once you are able to, the information is valuable to decide what options to improve SQL performance.

SQLPlus is essential for me to easily create dynamic or run-time queries to be executed in the Oracle Database.

The information from the Oracle toolsets to diagnose performance can be a bit daunting if you do not know what to look for.

It would be cool to easily identify issues such as stale indexes, missing indexes, etc. with a click of a button. The execution plan should show that issue easily.

Performance - We have several ERP systems all running on various platforms. By far the best performance in terms of consistency being up and available is our Oracle platform. To put into scale, out of all three platforms, since I have been employed, Oracle has not been down once, while the other two have been down multiple times, to the point that my attendance at OOW2019 is focused on migration from other platforms to Oracle.

Security - The matter of security is huge. One of the biggest points in choosing an Oracle database and appliance over anything else is the security it provides in counter to anything else on the market.

Training - While there is an enormous amount of training available, there are still gaps in terms of availability for classroom-style learning. I have found it more effective to be in a classroom setting where one is held accountable at that moment in time as opposed to self-paced (pure personal preference).

Cost - While we love the databases and appliances, the cost of maintaining is becoming an issue when competitors are coming in at such a lower point. Pushing this to a more profits oriented C-level makes justification difficult at times.

An automated case management system has eliminated our duplication of effort in most instances.

Having electronic work papers has allowed us to access other case files so we have access to more data saving us time and stopping the need for duplicate request.

Our compliance cases are very task-oriented and the out of the box flow works very well with these cases.

From the audit perspective, we have had to customize a lot to meet our electronic work paper needs.

We have quite a few open Oracle service requests that have been outstanding for years.

The history around the completed task is lacking out of the box.

We have our really sensitive information and we trust our information is secure.

It's fast, and we need that for our everyday work.

The Oracle client could have some discovery tools, like graphic reports

We could use some machine learning capabilities

It would be great if we could generate some graph directly from the client tools

Very strong relational database

Easy to maintain

Access to support 24/7

Should be able to create temporary tables, like we do in Sybase, dynamically inside code

Nice SGA management

Easy to apply profiles on poorly performing SQLs

One platform for both OLTP and analytics

Auto SQL tuning

Better LOB management

XML Processing

Performance is good if we have the right technical resources.

Good analytics functions.

Easy to use.

Built-in querying tools

Make it easy to install/improvements in installing the database.