Oracle Coherence Reviews

• Memory grid
• Multicast support

It helped us to cache the data in memory and improved performance by 10x.

The cross-site or cross-data center replication seems slow. This can be improved.

We have been using this solution for four years.

We have a stability issue once a year on the average. Most of the time, the cause is a network issue. When a few servers get out of the cluster, we lose data.

There have not really been any scalability issues.

Technical support is OK, but it is not really great.

The installation was pretty easy.

You can go ahead with this product blindly if you are looking for a memory grid kind of solution. The license is there for sure.

In order, the most valuable features are:

1. Flexible topology
2. Data affinity
3. Configurability
4. POF (optimized) serialization
5. Support of C++ & Java

We are system integrators. We used Coherence in building a transaction processing system for a client. Introducing a data grid, we moved from a vertically scalable solution to full scalability. The data grid helped a lot to reach the goal of scaling the system in a virtualized environment.

Monitoring and control of the grid was only via JMX interface. Logging was distributed, thus hard to collect and put in order to be able to investigate the issues, eventually. Today's Coherence version has a new logging system and a web-based UI.

I have been using it for 1,5 years.

No stability issues: A node can fail, but the topology can be designed to be fault-tolerant.

Scalability is safe. The data is distributed/replicated. Adding/removing a node only has the cost of re-distributing the partitions of the data across the network.

N.A.

We did not previously use a different solution.

It is very easy to set up a basic topology, but hard to configure and tune to make it really work.

N.A. The client paid a license for the full Oracle stack of products.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options. The client used the full Oracle stack in their architecture.

Before you can master Coherence, you must study how a data grid works. So, start learning about common data grid patterns. The next step is Coherence documentation, which is clear, but huge.

We use Coherence to keep aware of critical data. We have millions of customers whose data is in Coherence. Previously, when we stored customer data in the database, it took about seven minutes just to locate one customer profile. About 90% of customer data is static. Since we implemented Coherence, this data is in memory all the time; so the results are found in milliseconds instead of five seconds. Our response time for customers calling us over our portal has reduced drastically. We are now able to provide service to our customers much faster. This is amazing, especially for our customers.

It has really transformed the speed that we can respond to customers. Now I don't need to worry about increasing my customer base. I used to wonder how I was really going to provide service to over five million customers. Generally, as the number of customers goes up, the biggest challenge is to provide the same kind of response time. Now I don't need to worry about it. I can just keep growing our customer base, but our response time tends to remain the same.

Reloading really takes a lot of time.

We are already using it for a couple of years.

It is a stable product. We don't really have any issues. The only thing that we really need to think about is when we need to reload the whole thing, especially if we need to do some patching or maintenance. That really takes about 24 hours. That's the downside. It’s something that we are now living with. So we really take that hit on that. Generally, that's why we really plan our maintenance.

I think now I really need that more in a hardware way; but I would really not find that as a challenge anymore. We are actually able to do it more comfortably because now, whether I'm scaling up or scaling down, it's very transparent.

I can't really live without Oracle technical support. There are times when we have so many challenges and into so much trouble and so many issues. They are very helpful. Without them, I would say we can't even function; so they are really good. We have platinum support, and we are able to get their support. Sometimes there are escalations which we need to go through to get the right SLA engaged. But I think we are really getting critical support.

We did not have a different solution before. We were looking for this solution. The response time is the key. It was really touching. When we really started with five million customers, the response time was four seconds. The customer base was increasing, and that became five seconds; and then six seconds. It just kept going up. So we thought we needed to come up with some solution for reducing the response time.

We were looking for a cost-effective solution. Nowadays, any business must keep the operating cost in mind. Why do we want to go for the cloud? Because we are spending so much on the hardware. I really want to make sure my investment in hardware brings a good cost-effective return on the investment.

I keep everything in mind. Of course, I also look for the security and scalability.

The initial setup was neither complex nor really easy. It was somewhere in the middle. I didn't really involve myself in that directly. I am one of the heads of the site. I just fed them the data. It was pretty much implemented by mid-level people; so I don’t really know what the challenges were.

I think this is the only solution we considered. Whenever we really look for a product, first we look whether Oracle has something appropriate. I have been using Oracle for a number of years. I think they always have a solution. They started with the database. Now they have the middleware and the hardware. They have the complete application solutions. You name it and they have it.

Coherence had all the features and benefits we needed.

Look into Coherence’s features. Get a demo first and evaluate whether you can really make use of this product.

Oracle Coherence enables our customers to pay their bills and view their usage and all other kinds of information. We use Oracle’s Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) for managing all billing data. Our business customers use it to manage hundreds of accounts.

Mobile devices need to load faster. Coherence lets us retrieve data from the CC&B and the database, build a full user profile, and store this information in the session in Coherence. With this, you do not need the back-end system anymore. After the first login, the site loads faster because it does not need to go to the back end.

We have about 10 servers so that all 10 servers are used for load balancing. If I pay the bill, this information gets passed from one server to the next with Oracle synchronizing the data between servers. I can perform different actions on the same account. That information is handled by different servers, but Oracle synchronizes the data.

The product quality is good. It is stable and easy to use; and increasingly flexible when you scale up.

Oracle Coherence improved site performance and the customer experience. Customers don’t want to see that the site is too slow or that there are breaks in transactions. They want faster access, especially for mobile devices. For people with network bandwidth and a data plan, it has to be faster.

It is alright now. It is a heavyweight. It would be good if it could be made more lightweight, and could be more easily installed in a local environment, and made easier to use later on, in the open source.

It's quite stable. Ever since I started using it, for the past year, we only had to restart that product one time.

Coherence was not originally an Oracle product. Oracle bought it and made it more mature. They made it enterprise-wide; and it’s good. They also made it a bit pricier. We were using an EH cache open source, which actually wasn’t performing that well. We had to do a lot of restarting and troubleshooting. But now with Coherence, it's quite stable. Because we are an Oracle vendor, we have a license.

For scalability, it is basically the JVM. If you want to scale up, it is just a matter of adding a JVM. It can scale horizontally, and it can scale vertically. If you want to add 10 servers, just add a JVM. Right now, we have our own 14 instances.

We have a grid for JVM installations, so if we want to use the 10 servers, and other people also want to use them, they are likely to build something. It can be scalable.

Oracle technical support has multiple support levels: with platinum and gold plans. We got the platinum support, because we are at Oracle shop rates. They come and always work with us; and they sold us many of the Oracle products. For any small thing, if we are not getting attention, and we need immediate support, we can invite support people to come in onboard; and they will do it for us.

We did research on all the open source products, and we initially applied the solution with EH cache. That was pretty good. When we wanted to scale higher, to about six million users, it wasn’t going to work. We don’t care about the expense because Oracle is our partner, and more. If you are a small business that cannot afford million-dollar products, you would go for an EH cache. We can afford a million-dollar product, so we are doing that.

Initial setup is not exactly easy. At first, it is a little complicated. Once you do it, and stabilize the solution, it is good. People who are know these kinds of things can do it.

It is very expensive. It might not work well for small business people.

We did research on all the open source products.

To a similar client looking for advice, I’d say that this is a great product, but you need to pay the price for it. If you are willing to pay the price, you will be satisfied with the product quality. It has more than what you need.

At the enterprise level, if you have all your own data center, Oracle, Coherence, and if you are willing to spend that much money, Oracle is great.

But if you are a small business, going with open source, there are a lot of things available. EH cache is the most popular open source thing with its caching mechanism. That worked well for us on a smaller scale. You need to determine whether that’s going to work for you.

There are multiple products out there. The main determining factors are whether you want to have a local or distributed cache; and whether you want to use it in the Cloud or locally. If you are using it in the Cloud, you can explore multiple options. If you’re use Oracle, they are going to advise you. You are going to need to plan out and implement the caching and system customizations.

The most important features to me are its scalability, high availability, and distributed caching mechanism.

We used the distributed caching mechanism to keep the cache up-to-date with the database. Implementation of the Touch processor helped a lot.

They could make the configuration management easier. Failure maintenance could be improved.

We have been using Oracle Coherence for one year.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We received very good technical support.

Before using Oracle Coherence, we tried using Ehcache. We switched because of replication, grid support, and a few other reasons.

The initial setup was straightforward. The documentation and technical support also helped.

Before we decided to use Oracle Coherence, we tried out Ehcache, but found the Oracle Coherence better suited our product implementation requirements.

Oracle Coherence is a very good product which helps to create internet-scale applications using a high-performance grid.

The most valuable features are ease of use, scalability without too much work, and failover recovery.

We were trying to get better performance of compute tasks previously developed on RDBMS to cache and it has improved the performance by a factor of 4.

I'd like to see:

• More documentation
• Less/easier configuration
• More IDE support or create a spring-boot starter

I have used this product for around six months.

I have not really encountered any stability issues. I was pleased with its fault tolerance.

I have not encountered any scalability issues either.

We have not made use of any technical support as of yet.

We tried several approaches towards our goal of performance improvement. This was the most likely solution and hence was used.

The tutorials helped, but I use NetBeans, so there was a learning curve, but nothing complicated.

The price is high. I believe there should be a cheaper version for only the caching solution.

We have not evaluated other caching products because this an Oracle product and the product/solution was from Oracle too. We tried some streaming alternatives like Spark, etc.

The product is great, simple, and easy to use and integrate. See if your infrastructure supports it; if there are ways to make it work. Do a PoC before deciding.

High availability, distributed calculation features, and WebLogic integration are the most valuable features to me.

It decreased response times in B2B operations thanks to the grid calculations.

IDEs support and hot deployment have room for improvement.

I have used Oracle Coherence for four years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

The scalability issue I encountered was that it costs a lot!

The technical support was excellent.

I did not use a different solution before Oracle Coherence. My company was using Memcached before I started working there, but I always used Coherence.

Initial setup was complex because we integrated GAR files in EAR files. We were one of the first customers who were building the cluster, along with the business logic, and deploying everything together in a single operation. We got a complete step-by-step to cover our needs from the post-sales engineering team.

The product is the best, but it's absurdly expensive because licensing is according to the number of CPUs. The only advice I can give is to purchase specific hardware with a few CPUs that are as fast as possible, and with a lot of memory.

We evaluated Memcached, Redis, and Infinispan.

Learn distributed computing first. It's not worth using only as a key-value cache. If interrupted business operations is an important consideration, think about deploying the grid along with an application in WebLogic instead of building a separate and independent cluster.

The most valuable features are the entry processors for their atomic update ability; and the ability to route an event to one specific node in the cluster.

By embedding Coherence and clustering the application, you can eliminate single source of failure problems. 

We use WebLogic as the JMS provider. For technical reasons, we were not successful in clustering it, so we have a single source of failure problem.

I would like to see a more modern API like Hazelcast or Infinispan.

I have used Oracle Coherence for two years.

The product is stable and solid.

We did not try a different solution, but we searched for a solid product with a good reputation in a financial organization.

Initial setup is straightforward, but it takes some time to tune the cache parameters.

We implemented it through an in-house team.

First compare the product to the more open source competitors, like Apache Ignite and Hazelcast.

Caching: It allows applications to cache objects and application-specific data in an in-memory data grid, which provides substantial gain in performance. In my experience, while working on customers’ solutions where performance is a key requirement, along with robustness and stability needs, I have always found Oracle Coherence as the best solution for integrating with different Oracle products and caching data for application-specific needs.

I have worked on different projects that sometimes demand high performance (millions of transaction per day) without compromising availability or sequencing of the flows. Therefore, Oracle Coherence offered the possibility to cache and also allow sharing of cached objects through remote availability of the cache. Oracle Coherence is easy to integrate using any industry-based programming solution and standard products (works very effectively with Oracle middleware technologies). With Oracle Coherence, we managed to decouple many of our backend and legacy systems through limiting many incoming transactional requests and therefore improving performance immensely in such systems.

In my experience, I did find it challenging to use this product when namespace prefixes on the resulting XML object was a requirement. I learned that the default output from Coherence cache used to strip all of the namespace prefixes and namespace definitions if the input XML object had them. And, if the system that retrieves the result doesn’t receive namespace prefixes, there could be challenges with parsing of the output.

It is important to mention that this was experienced when the Coherence cache was used for remote caching and accessed through an out-of-the-box REST API. As a temporary fix, I had to add annotations to all JAXB-generated classes, along with the namespaces of all the involved elements. I think there should be default support for namespaces and their prefixes, when JAXB classes are used as object factories (generated from schema definition files (XSD)). Over time, with XDD changes, we had to generate new JAXB classes, and had to bump namespaces manually through annotations and bundle the object factory.

I have used it for around three years.

I encountered stability issues sometimes, but that was mainly due to the wrong cache configuration used in implementation. Wrong configuration causes an impact on how objects are serialized or retained, etc.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. In fact, we had a configuration that allowed the cache to fill up to its limit and then was flushed when entire cache was fully occupied.

Oracle support was really good in cases when I had troubles with implementation. Also, when I asked the question regarding namespaces as mentioned, I received very good cooperation.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Installation was rather straightforward and usage was simple. But the complex part was mainly using PofSerializer, which did not work that easily for me and we ended up using a standard Java serialiser in the end.

I am not sure about pricing and licensing, but what I remember from my experience, if a customer has a WebLogic license, it should be ok to use the Coherence cache. But I might be wrong.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. While using the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack, it was always our preferred choice due to its integration capability with available tools.

Caching in an important element in order to gain a stable and high-performing system. Therefore, it is important that this product, which is designed to help, should be implemented in the correct way. There are different architectural patterns that can be referred before using cache, best practises regarding cache and invalidation schemes around objects. It is also important to consider the reliability of the object state during usage and also to make sure that its usage is compliant with Oracle’s best practises regarding cache.

One of the features that is greatly used by us is clustering, as it allows us to scale easier by creating more and more nodes.

Coherence has helped us to drastically reduce the request time of our web applications.

Documentation and community support is the first area with room for improvement. Then, an easier configuration mechanism wouldn’t hurt. And also debugging and error management.

I have used it for two years.

We have encountered stability issues. We have nodes failing all the time, especially because of timeouts caused by node synchronization, but occasionally there are also memory-related errors.

We have encountered scalability issues. Currently, we have multiple clusters of six nodes each. At one point, we tried to scale to 12 nodes. We started to have a lot of nodes crashing, most probably because of all the node chatter.

I would say technical support is a 4/10.

I did not previously use a different solution, but if we would do the application from ground zero, we would, most probably, choose Hazelcast.

Initial setup is somehow complex, as you have to configure the hosts that will hold the Coherence nodes, every cache that you set up and all of the domain classes to be used for serialization.

Look into the direction of open-source solutions.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options, because our company has a “Use Oracle Products” policy.

Look attentively at other NoSQL solutions, and if they really need a caching solution, then look at Hazelcast.