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Review: Oracle Database 12c
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Riyaj Shamsudeen offers an in-depth look at Oracle Database 12c, which he calls a 'true cloud database,' bringing a new level of efficiency and ease to database consolidation. 'In development for roughly four years, Oracle Database 12c introduces so many important new capabilities in so many areas — database consolidation, query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery — that even a lengthy review has to cut corners. Nevertheless, in addition to covering the big ticket items, I'll give a number of the lesser enhancements their due,' writes Riyaj Shamsudeen. 'Having worked with the beta for many months, I can tell you that the quality of software is also impressive, starting with a smooth RAC cluster installation. As with any new software release, I did encounter a few minor bugs. Hopefully these have been resolved in the production release that arrived yesterday.'"
Wait what. He wrote a review about Oracle, gave an 8 for value, and didn't mention pricing? Is this some kind of shill or such?
Even for a shill I would at least expect a line like
'Yes, a license for a normal octocore setup costs more than your home, but...'
or 'After going through the 2 hour cost calculation matrix, the resulting price seemed a tad steep, but'
It's a complex product. of course it has a point-and-grunt installer, but anything else requires configuring the product, and it doesn't have an "easy mode", simply because it's not targeting "simple people".
You're thinking from a tiny point of view (small company or personal). And yes, in this case, oracle DB might not be for you. But a company which makes arguably billions off data located in an oracle DB Cluster doesn't care whether the DB needs 0, 1, or 25 people who manage it. Whatever the costs are, they represent a tiny fraction of the profits.
if your monthly profit is $10K then your DB costs might need to be below $200. However, make your monthly profit $500M, then you can afford spending anywhere between $200K and $1M a month on the DB and its support (licensed or in-house) and even more.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
This is all very true. For a small website MySQL or MariaDB are fine. I work in government and we collect, process and create terrabytes of ocean data a month for weather, sea ice, waves, salinity, temperature, oxygen, species migration, satellite imagery, and tons of other things. I hate Oracle because of their business practices and general asshatery as much as the next techie, but for large databases that require the kind of collection, processing and modeling we do, Oracle is all there is.
You're especially right that there's no "easy mode". I think it'd be silly to include such a thing and dumb down such a hugely complex product to a level that you might as well be using MySQL or MariaDB. And for the amount of data we deal with and the number of database instances we have, yes it's a full time DB admin job. God forbid the someone was to pull a Bobby tables because we didn't have someone qualified creating and maintaining the databases at all times.