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Oracle's Coherence Cache brings in-memory performance to applications.
January 24, 2020

Oracle's Coherence Cache brings in-memory performance to applications.

Gene Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Coherence

Oracle Coherence is our enterprise solution for elastic caching and is used across the organization. Our team was previously using IBM Websphere Extreme Scale appliances, but the deployment of those devices was cumbersome because we had to deploy physical devices. Our team decided to migrate over to Oracle Coherence, which we had initially looked at when the product was Tangosol before Oracle Coherence purchased them. We use Oracle Coherence to cache data close to the application server to avoid the round trip latency and lookup times at the data tier.
  • scale out
  • caching
  • Better documentation on setting up various use cases.
  • Improved performance of our customer facing transactions.
  • It allowed us to integrate with other applications across the enterprise for the consumption of our data.
Oracle Coherence is more straightforward to deploy than IBM Datapower ExtremeScale. We used ExtremeScale previously in the form of their Datapower caching appliances. The firmware was difficult to upgrade in the appliances, and we had trouble getting them patched successfully to address specific vulnerabilities. As a result, we decided to migrate to Oracle Coherence. We evaluated Redis and ElastiCache but chose to go with oracle Coherence. Because of the existing technical expertise within our enterprise.

Do you think Oracle Coherence delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Oracle Coherence's feature set?

Yes

Did Oracle Coherence live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Oracle Coherence go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Oracle Coherence again?

Yes

Oracle Coherence can be used to solve latency problems by caching data near the application tier. In-memory performance helps to reduce data contention, thus improving application response time. Oracle Coherence does a great job at scaling linearly and can do so dynamically. Oracle Coherence can replicate data so it can be part of a disaster recovery solution. One thing that is often overlooked with elastic caches is their ability to analyze data in memory, leveraging the processing power of the data grid. This is something Oracle Coherence does exceptionally well. Oracle Coherence also provided event handling capabilities to allow applications to respond to events triggered by transactions.

Oracle Coherence Feature Ratings

Database Development
9.0
Version control tools
9
Performance optimization tools
10
Schema maintenance
9
Database change management
8
Database Administration
8.3
User management
8
Database security
10
Database status reporting
7
Change management
8

Evaluating Oracle Coherence and Competitors

Yes - IBM Datapower ExtremeScale. The IBM product was harder to scale dynamically because it is an appliance-based product - at least the version we were using. We decided to migrate to the Oracle Coherence product because it was an enterprise approved and used product. We wanted to leverage the in-house expertise on Oracle Coherence.
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Oracle Coherence is an enterprise approved and used product. We decided to migrate from the appliance based product to the software based product. The fact that we had in-house talent was probably the biggest factor influencing our decision to switch. The enterprise of course is also trying to limit the number of different products we have to support.
I would keep our existing scorecard process that we use. Several criteria are evaluated, and scoring has guidelines as to what each of the ratings means. It helps keep us objective. The criteria are developed based on our use cases and our support model. It seems to work well.

Oracle Coherence Support

Oracle Coherence support team is responsive and knowledgeable. We contacted them to ask a couple of design questions about how we were setting up Oracle Coherence based on how we used IBM's Datapower Extreme Scale. They were able to guide us so that we got the design correct the first time and didn't have to go back and re-architect our design later.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - Our application is a critical tier-one application, so we pay for the premium support tier. We can't afford to have an outage with our application, so when trouble strikes, we need to restore service as fast as possible. Paying the extra for premium support just makes good business sense to us.
They helped guide our design of how we were integrating the product into our environment. They reviewed our existing architecture and made recommendations to give us the best overall design to meet our needs. I feel this was above and beyond as we didn't have to hire professional services for this advice.