Think Oracle 12c - Think Big
November 17, 2016
Think Oracle 12c - Think Big
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Database 12c
I have used Oracle since Oracle6 and may different versions are used within the telecommunications company I work for. Oracle12c is used in this review within an Exadata architecture context where there is a need to process many billions of records a day and retain these records for up to 12 months plus allow users to access and query the data. However [I'm] saying that 99% of this review goes for normal Oracle12. Like all companies, data security and having the confidence our data is secure is a critical must. You can only imagine the size of this data both on disk and within the numerous tables within our database, it's huge! All the data and processing are subject to internal and external legal SLAs which directly affect our ability to provide service, retain commercial licenses. As you can imagine these huge datasets require some 'grunt' behind them and Oracle is the only solution I have found that meets all these requirements.
- Data Security - With the Database Vault Option (non-core 12c and licensed separately) installed you can provide different 'restricted' views of the datasets to users and even DBAs/support staff. So ensuring sensitive data is only seen by those who need to see it. Saying that the normal features within Oracle 12c make it the most secure and user access configurable.
- Data Availability - To us a significant factor - So 12c has available ASM (Automatic Storage Management) - that basically takes over the disk from the OS and thus allows data to be managed much more effectively and the multi-node model that Exadata (and RAC) provide. With this multi-node approach data can be processed by multiple nodes (great for large datasets) and your data is duplicated efficiently between nodes in case of a node failing.
- Data Exports & Imports - To me this is important, as without being able to get data in the database you won't have a lot of use of the database! Oracle provides a great toolset for getting data in and out of the database in a quick manner - either entire database dumps or exports/imports of single tablespaces, tables or indexes.
- Database Enterprise Manager - Complex yes but this tool provides a great interface into how the database is working. Access can be configured to allow a full DBA or a subset to allow technical users an insight into how their queries are performing.
- At a techie level we can create tables with many thousands of partitions and indexes on the partition level - then compress the older partitions (which are still available for queries). Same goes for indexes and we ca rebuild indexes the partition level rather than one huge index. This really works well when importing large datasets.
- Overall Oracle is a complex beast and requires a firm understanding of computing architecture/principles to set up, develop for and to support. So be prepared to spend and invest big and I mean big on your people and allow projects time to develop. Implementing Oracle properly doesn't take a day it can take weeks if not months to set up and tune.
- Costly - Hardware Costs, Support, product license costs (not all features and some of the best are extra) plus training for Oracle can be very expensive compared to other databases. So do your home work - Can you justify the cost the initial and ongoing costs?
- Positive - We are confident our data is held securely in the database and access is strictly controlled. We can demonstrate this in our internal security audits and externally that the appropriate checks and balances are in place. This ability to check is critical to our ability to trade.
- Positive - The distributed nature of Exadata/RAC allows us to be sure our data is available in case of a node(s) failure. Recovery of a failed node is straightforward. Being able to provide access to the data is critical to our customer SLAs.
Nothing really comes close to Oracle 12c in terms of grunt, security and availability. We use MySQL but this lacks key features that Oracle has and begins to creak when you have a few hundred million rows in a table and found it was nowhere near at restricting access to data, encryption, compression and partitioning, clustering. MySQL says it does it and it does but it is limited and clumsy.