Astra DB vs. Oracle Database

We've been super happy with Astra DB. It's been extremely well-suited for our vector search needs as described in previous responses. With Astra DB’s high-performance vector search, Maester’s AI dynamically optimizes responses in real-time, adapting to new user interactions without requiring costly retraining cycles.

Incentivized

I believe Oracle Database is still the best RDBMS database which is the database to consider for OLTP applications and for Adhoc requests. They are good in Datawarehousing in certain aspects but not the best. Oracle is also a great database for scaling up with their Clusterware solution which also makes the database highly available with services moving to the live instance without much trouble.

Incentivized

• We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
• Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
• A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.

Incentivized

• Best thing about it is that it supports PL/SQL which is helpful in writing complex quarries easily.
• Its storage capacity , backup and recovery features make it the best database storage tool available.
• Other thing I like about this software is its interface is so good.

Incentivized

• Need better fine-grained Security options.
• The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken.
• They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications.

Incentivized

• The memory demand and management makes it impossible to run it in a container.
• It is hard to perform local unit testing with Oracle even using the personal edition (aggressive all the available memory grab for itself).
• Lack of built in database migrations (e.g. as Flyway).
• The need to install the Oracle client in addition to its drivers.
• The cost of running it, especially in the Cloud.
• Comes with very spartan community grade client/management tools whereas the commercial offerings tend to demand a premium price.

Incentivized

There is a lot of sunk cost in a product like Oracle 12c. It is doing a great job, it would not provide us much benefit to switch to another product even if it did the same thing due to the work involved in making such a switch. It would not be cost effective.

Incentivized

It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution

Incentivized

Many of the powerful options can be auto-configured but there are still many things to take into account at the moment of installing and configuring an Oracle Database, compared with SQL Server or other databases. At the same time, that extra complexity allows for detailed configuration and guarantees performance, scalability, availability and security.

Incentivized

Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.

Incentivized

1. I have very good experience with Oracle Database support team. Oracle support team has pool of talented Oracle Analyst resources in different regions. To name a few regions - EMEA, Asia, USA(EST, MST, PST), Australia. Their support staffs are very supportive, well trained, and customer focused. Whenever I open Oracle Sev1 SR(service request), I always get prompt update on my case timely. 2. Oracle has zoom call and chat session option linked to Oracle SR. Whenever you are in Oracle portal - you can chat with the Oracle Analyst who is working on your case. You can request for Oracle zoom call thru which you can share the your problem server screen in no time. This is very nice as it saves lot of time and energy in case you have to follow up with oracle support for your case. 3.Oracle has excellent knowledge base in which all the customer databases critical problems and their solutions are well documented. It is very easy to follow without consulting to support team at first.

Incentivized

Overall the implementation went very well and after that everything came out as expected - in terms of performance and scalability. People should always install and upgrade a stable version for production with the latest patch set updates, test properly as much as possible, and should have a backup plan if anything unexpected happens

Graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring are all incorporated into a single platform by Astra DB. Mongo Db is a self-managed infrastructure. Astra DB has Wide column store and Mongo DB has Document store. The best thing is that Astra DB operates on Java while Mongo DB operates on C++

Incentivized

Oracle is more of an enterprise-level database than Access and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise isn't getting developed much (some people wonder how close it is to end of life) but SQL Server is miles ahead of Oracle IMO in terms of user experience and comparable in terms of performance AFAIK. As stated, a vendor forced our hand to use Oracle so we did not have a choice. If you are looking for help with an issue you are having, there are lots of SQL Server articles, etc. on the web and the community of SQL Server developers and DBA's is very strong and supportive. Oracle's help on the web is much more limited and often has an attitude that goes with it of superiority and lacking in compassion, IMO. For instance, check out the Ask Tom Oracle blog - a world of difference. If you choose Oracle, go into it with eyes wide open.

Incentivized

We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.

Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.

Incentivized

• Better uptime due to the managed service having no outages
• Less technical debt because we don't need to worry about upgrading our Cassandra clusters
• Lower cost on infrastructure as a whole
• Quick and easy to integrate vector search into our tech stack

Incentivized

• Oracle Database 12c has had a very positive impact on our ability to build strong and robust custom applications in house without the need to come up with our own methods of data storage and management.
• Oracle Database 12c has the strongest user interface of any database I have worked with and continuously is improving its strength with the addition of support for JSON and XML type objects in the database.
• Oracle Database 12c is sometimes very heavy and DBA intensive, but the benefits far outweigh the costs, which we need to spend on DBA support for enabling security and access features.

Incentivized