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Oracle Database from an academic perspective.
December 13, 2017

Oracle Database from an academic perspective.

venkat nitin panaganti | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Database

The Oracle Database is used as a part of coursework at RIT. It is used to teach the concepts of database management and access. As a part of this course, all participating students, professors, teaching assistants are required to implement, use, and modify when and as required. Even though it is being used for a strictly academic purpose, most of the important features are utilized and well exercised. At times, these databases are also used to implement major projects. All in all, it does serve the purpose of learning since it is being used in an academic context very well. This includes learning about various database management techniques, implementation schemas, and other PL/SQL features.
  • 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.
  • As this was used in an academic setting, there is no monetary gain. The gain was in terms of knowledge and I believe that this was perfectly achieved.
  • One small negative impact is that people who do not have a general idea about databases prior to using the Oracle database do seem to struggle a bit.
Compared to other SQL type databases, Oracle can simply be described as a super-set or an extension of them.
As Oracle has not only the features of SQL but also PL/SQL, it is much more feature rich compared to other databases technologies. However, there is no fair way to compared Oracle against MongoDB as their basic principles are on totally different terms.Any application that needs not only the power of storage but automatic manipulation of data dynamically during runtime is definitely a place where Oracle should be used.
The Oracle Database is very suitable for large-scale enterprise level applications, like maintaining a database for users of a particular electronic currency which interacts with credit card accounts and has a various number of functionalities like automatic transfer of money on a particular date and so on. This is obviously only one particular domain but in reality, it can be used in many other domains.

Oracle can be used for much smaller level applications or information storage purposes as well, but it might just be an overkill due to the performance issues it has, for example, using Oracle where we only need a small number of tables with almost all static values is not efficient.