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Oracle Because my Institution Forced It On Me, And I'm Grateful For It!
March 17, 2017

Oracle Because my Institution Forced It On Me, And I'm Grateful For It!

Clifford Marsiglio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Database 12c

Oracle is used within our data warehouse and is pretty much the key to my entire job! We store all student, financial, and human resource records here. It enables us to store terabytes (petabytes???) of information, daily snapshots, all at blazing fast speeds that allow us to measure, analyze, and predict trends within our organization.
  • The ability to analyze large datasets within memory and in realtime without having to schedule tasks and MAYBE get information out a few hours later.
  • Great vendor support, as well as third party support. Documentation is everywhere.
  • The ability to go beyond simple SQL and use programmatic logic through PL/SQL without having to leave the environment.
  • EXPENSIVE! I'd love to use this for personal research, but going to keep using F/OSS tools! All ironically owned by Oracle (the corporation) at this point! That said, it saves us money within the enterprise using it!
  • Installation...I have set up test installations of prior versions for departmental use outside the enterprise installation (former position)...compared to MySQL, it was a pain! Then again, if you are going to use this, you might as well get someone that knows what they are doing! I studied to be a psychologist, not a systems administrator (though I have pretended to be both!!!)
  • Even though I love the PL/SQL language, I still drop down to PHP (running at the command line...don't judge, its what I learned in undergrad) to do a lot of complex work, which is not the greatest idea when having to share between colleagues!
  • It is reliable. I have not seen a downage since working with this database. I am an end user and I rarely get into the nuts and bolts, so I can't say much about this!
  • There is a period of downtime nightly to backup all databases in which time we can only query against specific static feeds which is annoying! I would imagine the may be due to the nature of our enterprise and the fact that we do not need to operate into the late evening!
I am most familiar with MySQL products having learned this at university and utilizing it for my own research. I utilized this for machine intelligence applications (automated essay scoring and other psychometric work)...and for the volume of data I was collecting and using, the free software was more than enough. HOWEVER, in today's world, it wouldn't have stood up to HIPPA compliance with row and column level security to ensure anonymity between users! Or maybe it would, it's been a few years! To me, it comes down to price, complexity, and the amount of data. For my enterprise work, Oracle 12c is necessary.
Smaller datasets that are running where you are scratching an itch. Running a business in the past, we opted for MySQL as we knew our industry was small and our needs were not going to require the power. Additionally, we choose MySQL for the event that we MIGHT have needed to upsize to a better database...in which case, Oracle would have been ideal. There are other lightweight DB areas where this might just be too encumbering (i.e., I used another DB to quickly gather information from IoT...but we'd export it out for analysis into various forms).