What cons of Oracle can you find?
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
2009-12-06 22:32:26
Remember, only poor people pay retail ;)
David Aldridge
2009-12-07 10:55:30
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
2009-12-07 15:15:10
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
2009-12-07 15:29:46
+3
A:
- 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
2009-12-06 20:01:03
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
2009-12-06 22:29:55
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
2009-12-07 10:56:49
@ 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
2009-12-07 14:54:42
@ 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
2009-12-07 14:58:33
+4
A:
Oracle has put no effort into making deployment easy. (And they have good economic reasons not to.)
The '' IS NULL Problem.
bobince
2009-12-06 21:25:05
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
2009-12-07 06:59:43
Yeah, I've always had the suspicion some faction at Oracle really doesn't love XE. :-)
bobince
2009-12-07 13:09:26
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
2009-12-07 14:04:29
+2
A:
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.
- Immense scalability
- Supports object oriented tables
- Lots of folks to hire to work on it
- Runs on all sorts of hardware
- Partitioning is AMAZING
- Cost based query optimization
Philip Schlump
2009-12-07 06:21:25
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
2009-12-07 06:51:42
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
2009-12-07 10:58:12
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
2009-12-07 13:17:27
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
2009-12-07 15:06:21
@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
2009-12-07 17:47:40
A:
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
2009-12-13 09:31:54