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Oracle: Doesn't scale down. Lacks a lot of convenience features (BOOLEAN, DATE, IF (NOT) EXISTS, …). You need a team of DBAs to manage it and have a good relati

Oracle: Doesn't scale down. Lacks a lot of convenience features (BOOLEAN, DATE, IF (NOT) EXISTS, …). You need a team of DBAs to manage it and have a good relationship them (send birthday cards for their kids, I'm not making this up). You need to have people on your team with a good understanding of Oracle. Then the speed and information you can get out of it is amazing — given your corporate structure gives you access to a good disk subsystem. Support is a waste of time (we have a priority 1 bug open for more than half a year). 11.1g was so buggy that your DBAs would forbid us to go to 12.1c (BETWEEN AND wasn't working correctly). I just wish they would open source their JDBC driver and accept pull requests. Scale: about 10 TB, tables with between 500M and 1.5B rows, slow disk subsystem (SAN with about 150k IOP/s)

pjungwir 11y ago
The last time I used Oracle was 8i, but it certainly supported IF (NOT) EXISTS. I mostly agree with you about scaling down, and culturally Oracle DBAs are big at gatekeeping, but as a fairly junior database developer I was still able to figure out the basics of installing and configuring it, so maybe it's not that bad.
- needusername 11y ago
  I meant IF (NOT) EXISTS for DDL. It exists for DML of course.
iracic 11y ago
Handling requests can be tricky. Support site is very useful (althrough not a best example of user interface). Usually, you do not want to put your important stuff on first version of some release. Also new features, as somewhere said, are as some good wine - you need to give them some time to have a good use of them. > You need a team of DBA That surprises me any time I hear. Do you think you would need less people using some other RDBMS ? JDBC driver is actually very good. How would you improve it?
- needusername 11y ago
  > Support site is very useful No it's not. They do everything in their power to stall and put everything on you until you give up. First they ask you to upload dozens of pointless trace files that have nothing to do with the issue. Once that's done they'll ask you to "describe your architecture in detail". Then then it gets bogged down for months "in development" with no updates at all from their side. > you need to give them some time to have a good use of them Yeah right, because it's not like we're paying them multiple millions a year and can expect them to ship features that are tested and work. I mean it's Open Source, they're doing it in their free time and they accept patches. Right? > Do you think you would need less people using some other RDBMS ? Yes JDBC driver: - basically fix everything that shows up during our traces: -- don't use String#substring() for parsing SQL (hint to Oracle, you made it slow in 1.7.0_06, maybe you should have sent the memo to the rest of your organization) -- don't use regexes to do a case insensitive string compare -- there are more but these are just the ones I can remember on top of my head - fix buggy features: -- fix accessing generated keys -- fix accessing statement metadata (that was once working for the 12c driver but would throw an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException when you had a comment in the query and a NULL bind parameter, their "fix" was to always throw a SQLFeatureNotSupportedException) -- fix ResultSet#getDate to be JDBC Spec compliant (is was spec compliant in 11g but they changed it in 12c to violate the spec because "we know better than the JDBC specification" and "a major version allows us to do breaking changes") -- there are more but these are just the ones I can remember on top of my head - implement Java 8 support - basically apply every patch they have rolled out since the last driver release but they couldn't be bothered to make a new driver release because they do driver releases only with database releases because that makes a lot of sense - 12c has acceptable memory management, 11g had horrible memory management - there are more but these are just the ones I can remember on top of my head

pjungwir 11y ago

The last time I used Oracle was 8i, but it certainly supported IF (NOT) EXISTS. I mostly agree with you about scaling down, and culturally Oracle DBAs are big at gatekeeping, but as a fairly junior database developer I was still able to figure out the basics of installing and configuring it, so maybe it's not that bad.

needusername 11y ago
I meant IF (NOT) EXISTS for DDL. It exists for DML of course.

iracic 11y ago

Handling requests can be tricky. Support site is very useful (althrough not a best example of user interface). Usually, you do not want to put your important stuff on first version of some release. Also new features, as somewhere said, are as some good wine - you need to give them some time to have a good use of them. > You need a team of DBA That surprises me any time I hear. Do you think you would need less people using some other RDBMS ? JDBC driver is actually very good. How would you improve it?

needusername 11y ago
> Support site is very useful No it's not. They do everything in their power to stall and put everything on you until you give up. First they ask you to upload dozens of pointless trace files that have nothing to do with the issue. Once that's done they'll ask you to "describe your architecture in detail". Then then it gets bogged down for months "in development" with no updates at all from their side. > you need to give them some time to have a good use of them Yeah right, because it's not like we're paying them multiple millions a year and can expect them to ship features that are tested and work. I mean it's Open Source, they're doing it in their free time and they accept patches. Right? > Do you think you would need less people using some other RDBMS ? Yes JDBC driver: - basically fix everything that shows up during our traces: -- don't use String#substring() for parsing SQL (hint to Oracle, you made it slow in 1.7.0_06, maybe you should have sent the memo to the rest of your organization) -- don't use regexes to do a case insensitive string compare -- there are more but these are just the ones I can remember on top of my head - fix buggy features: -- fix accessing generated keys -- fix accessing statement metadata (that was once working for the 12c driver but would throw an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException when you had a comment in the query and a NULL bind parameter, their "fix" was to always throw a SQLFeatureNotSupportedException) -- fix ResultSet#getDate to be JDBC Spec compliant (is was spec compliant in 11g but they changed it in 12c to violate the spec because "we know better than the JDBC specification" and "a major version allows us to do breaking changes") -- there are more but these are just the ones I can remember on top of my head - implement Java 8 support - basically apply every patch they have rolled out since the last driver release but they couldn't be bothered to make a new driver release because they do driver releases only with database releases because that makes a lot of sense - 12c has acceptable memory management, 11g had horrible memory management - there are more but these are just the ones I can remember on top of my head