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What cons of Oracle can you find?

Szymon Lipiński
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    Compared to what? – Michael Petrotta Dec 06 '09 at 19:58
  • But why close? It is a good question for people to know cons of it. :( – Guru Dec 06 '09 at 20:05
  • That's funny that I can't ask any IT related question that I want, or maybe you're working for Oracle? – Szymon Lipiński Dec 06 '09 at 20:08
  • @Simon: questions can be reopened. Improve yours, and it probably will be. Here are some tips: describe what you're trying to do. What kind of project are you building? How will your data be used? What kind of capabilities are you looking for? What are your constraints? Do you want a comparison of Oracle to another, specific database product, or to no database at all? – Michael Petrotta Dec 06 '09 at 20:15
  • I think this is the time to move somewhere else with my questions so the Oracle worshippers won't censorship it, this site is going to quite funny direction. – Szymon Lipiński Dec 06 '09 at 20:18
  • I don't want to improve my question, I want to have answers exactly to this question. And I don't see any point of reopening it in this community so it will be closed again and again. – Szymon Lipiński Dec 06 '09 at 20:20
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    Re-open it, turn it into a wiki! It's a question where answers are based upon opinions. Such topics are better as wiki's than generic questions. It is a good question! – Wim ten Brink Dec 06 '09 at 20:28
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    I suggest you highlight that you mean **programming** points - and if you don't mean that (but more sysadmin etc), perhaps ask on serverfault instead? We can migrate if you want... – Marc Gravell Dec 06 '09 at 20:57
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    It doesn't make tea ? Seriously, you weigh up pros and cons against a requirement. Can we use 'A' to achieve 'X'. After that, you may weigh it up against the competition. Is 'A' cheaper than 'B', or do we have skills available in 'D' ? – Gary Myers Dec 06 '09 at 22:27
  • It doesn't make toast either. Definitely a con. – Peter Recore Dec 07 '09 at 06:43
  • @Simon: I hate Oracle too, but doesn't change the fact that your question is too vague and open-ended to yield really useful information. I think this is the main reason it's being received so poorly here. Stay tuned for: "What are the cons of women?" – Carl Smotricz Dec 07 '09 at 15:19
  • Carl has hit the nail on the head. The question is vague whether you are asking about Oracle, SQL Server, or postgres. – Peter Recore Dec 07 '09 at 17:50
  • Just like any technology or RDBMS it's has has limitations. What is the business case you are looking at using a database for? – Ben Bahrenburg Dec 08 '09 at 15:57

5 Answers5

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It's expensive.

gorsky
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    Except for Oracle XE which is free. Or Oracle Personal Edition which is pretty cheap (depending on what you compare it against). Or Standard Edition which can be reasonable (depending, again, on what you compare it against). Oh, and if you have data worth hundreds of millions of dollars, then even Enterprise Edition could be considered inexpensive. – Gary Myers Dec 06 '09 at 22:32
  • Remember, only poor people pay retail ;) – David Aldridge Dec 07 '09 at 10:55
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    2c about "expensive": Though not by choice, I'm a subscriber of *Information Week*, where suits talk about IT. A couple of months ago, CIOs were complaining bitterly there about Oracle's practice of enforcing a "maintenance contract" tax of 15% of sales price annually. This is not reasonable pricing, this is gouging based on a de facto monopoly. THIS is one reason why people call Oracle "expensive". – Carl Smotricz Dec 07 '09 at 15:15
  • Many aspects of this issue boils down to famous "open-source solution" vs "commercial solution" flame-war ;) The latter gives good support, but can be monopolist, and so on, and so forth.. – gorsky Dec 07 '09 at 15:29
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  • Oracle for private/small-time use is free. But Oracle for bigger users becomes EXPENSIVE quickly.
  • Oracle is not simple to configure. Big buck paying companies usually keep full time Oracle admins on staff.
  • If you're interfacing with Open Source code a lot, Oracle is not exactly popular there. You'd be closer to home with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
  • After installing Oracle, you'll feel like your PC is no longer yours. It's HUGE and drains a lot of memory and performance.
Carl Smotricz
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  • Oracle XE is free. Oracle Person/Standard/Enterprise Editions are not, whether for small-time use or not. I'd also argue that Oracle is not for a PC 'personal computer' but a dedicated server. – Gary Myers Dec 06 '09 at 22:29
  • There are a lot of companies with a vested interest in telling you that oracle is difficult to configure, and that indexes need regular rebuilding, and that you need to hire them in to help you. Buyer beware. – David Aldridge Dec 07 '09 at 10:56
  • @ Gary: Good job on reading the glossy pamphlets. XE is a toy version of Oracle that has built-in hard limits. Who cares what the name is? Likewise, the less limited versions (suitable for bigger outfits) are more expensive. I'm happy to see we're in agreement. As for PC... I'm alluding to a target space where there isn't enough money to set up a server just for development/testing. Some DBs can be run on the developer's PC for easy local testing, but Oracle is not well suited to this role. – Carl Smotricz Dec 07 '09 at 14:54
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    @ David Aldridge: I've installed Oracle XE and I've installed dBase, Interbase, Firebird, MySQL, HSQL and Derby. Of all those, Oracle gave me the most problems. Just one dev's anecdotal evidence, I know. Note that I do *not* offer consultation services, even if you threaten me with money. :) – Carl Smotricz Dec 07 '09 at 14:58
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  1. Oracle has put no effort into making deployment easy. (And they have good economic reasons not to.)

  2. The '' IS NULL Problem.

Community
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bobince
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  • 1) Yes, true. There is Express Edition, but it is a version behind and can only be used for small installations. I wish they'd put some more effort into XE. – Thilo Dec 07 '09 at 06:59
  • Yeah, I've always had the suspicion some faction at Oracle really doesn't love XE. :-) – bobince Dec 07 '09 at 13:09
  • Well IANADBA, but aside from sorting out package prerequisites on *nix the installation has always just been a matter of following instructions as far as I can tell. – David Aldridge Dec 07 '09 at 14:04
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The oracle license agreement allows them to audit your usage of the database. So if you license for 5 users and you have 50 you are going to pay for 50. For web sites they really want you to have a license for each user.

Hiring folks to work with Oracle is more expensive than other databases (IBM DB2 is $$$ too).

Since Oracle is so expensive it assumes that it is the only thing running on a computer and it wants to take all of the resources of the entire machine.

The design of Oracle is more favorable to a UN*X server than a Windows machine (That may or may not be a disadvantage to you).

Most documentation is strictly from Oracle - there is very little on the web documentation/help/examples. For MySQL or other open source databases there is usually an answer to your problem with a Google search.

There is a big list of good things about Oracle too.

  1. Immense scalability
  2. Supports object oriented tables
  3. Lots of folks to hire to work on it
  4. Runs on all sorts of hardware
  5. Partitioning is AMAZING
  6. Cost based query optimization
Philip Schlump
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    so it's a con that they expect you to actually pay for as many users as you actually use? Is there a database vendor that encourages cheating? – Peter Recore Dec 07 '09 at 06:51
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    Ref. Documentation, the oracle documentation is great though, and the forums are very active and helpful. There are maybe half a dozen books that will help get you through 99% of the rest. – David Aldridge Dec 07 '09 at 10:58
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    It is not a "con" that they expect you to pay. It is a huge argument when you are licensed for 5 users, you have 4 employees each with an individual account and the database says you have had 6 different users log in - and now they want you to pay more. – Philip Schlump Dec 07 '09 at 13:17
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    Given the choice between shelling out to a megacorp for the privilege of having them look over my shoulder into my DB, or investing just my time and a reasonable performance hit for a DB that lets me keep my autonomy, bet yer butt that I will always choose option B! If I ever do big enough business to change my mind on this, I'll let you know. – Carl Smotricz Dec 07 '09 at 15:06
  • @Philip. OK now I understand. It's the administrative hassle that sucks. Anecdote - My friend worked at a place where they were accidentally using the enterprise edition instead of standard (which is what thy were licensed for) for 7 years, and no one noticed until they went to upgrade to 10g. So apparently enforcement varies :) – Peter Recore Dec 07 '09 at 17:47
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out of my experience,

when we want to take a dump of the database and import later it takes for ever for a db of size 4 TB.

But if you do the same in DB2, its done in under an Hour.

Reason for oracle being very slow is, they do not allow users/dba to get dumps directly from the file level. they do not have any utilities or API to develop.

DB2 has some things like DSNUTILB, DSNTIAUD etc many more.

Venkataramesh Kommoju
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