Why choose Oracle? Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Choosing the best database product - Why Oracle?

“Why Oracle?” This was the question that everyone asked when Oracle was displacing the mainframe DB2 systems back in the early 1990’s. Back then, Oracle had carved-out a niche has being a versatile database, not constrained as DB2 was to MVS and Informix is to UNIX. At the time, I was charged with making a “buy” decision for the new “mini computer” databases, and I’ve been intimately involved in this question for decades.

Oracle is the not the most elegant database, and it’s not always the fastest platform. Oracle rose to the pinnacle of the IT world on other virtues. Rather than wait for the end-user community to react to market changes, Oracle took a proactive approach and often introduced features far-ahead of the market demand. I remember when Oracle 7 was undergoing beta testing and we wondered about the new “cost based optimizer,” “hash joins,” and bitmap indexes. In Oracle 8, we replaced EBU with RMAN and learned about partitioning and star transformations. And so on—high anticipation with every release.

Oracle Dedication to enhancements

At Oracle OpenWorld 2006, Oracle announced some exciting new features of Oracle 11g and they promise a mind-boggling 482 of them, some minor and some profound, including rolling upgrades, query results caching, and capture and replay of database workloads.

It’s not a random event that Oracle dominates the world’s database market and runs on over 60 platforms, everything from a Mainframe to a Mac.

Oracle does have many competitors in the marketplace, ready to pounce on any perceived weakness. We see these arguments from Oracle competitors:

Oracle is expensive—hey, you get what you pay for. Plus, Oracle now has the free Oracle XE to compete with MySQL.

Oracle is too complex—Complexity is the natural byproduct of being robust and flexible. However Oracle addresses this issue with automated memory and storage management. Beginning with 11g, Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) will enable a single storage pool to be shared by multiple databases for optimal load balancing. Also in 11g, all memory can be tuned automatically by setting one parameter. You literally tell Oracle how much memory it can use and it determines how much to use for PGA as well as SGA.

When managers have to make a “buy” decision for database software, they just go with the market leader. Isn’t that enough rationale?

 

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