What is our primary use case?
Our company is fully into Oracle. So, we use most of the enterprise things in Oracle, and our core application is in Oracle only.
The data reduction and Active Data Guard, all the stuff that's happening, is in Oracle only. Maybe we have a reactivation program trying to move into other purpose-built data, but that's in an early stage.
What is most valuable?
There are various advantages. First of all, easy to deploy. The only difficult part is the cost factor, licensing. In other ways, the implementation is very, very important.
Like, we have not encountered any major challenges with replication. We were able to achieve near-real-time replication. Also, with the switchover failover, we were not getting any technical issues. It's a pretty stable product.
Once you configure it, it goes through the rollback, and then Data Guard introduces this snapshot thing. So once the restoration happens, we can go back to the original thing, and we make that a standard.
It's a pretty decent and key function for Oracle. So, enterprise organizations go for Oracle only for features like these.
What needs improvement?
The only difficult part is the cost factor, licensing.
Another area of improvement is support.
Morever, Oracle's partner is not also doing good. For that, they should improve. Such enterprise features need a good partner. That is where Oracle Data Guard failed. They never had a good partner. I never found a good partner in India.
For how long have I used the solution?
My company has been using it for more than ten years. We are a reference customer for this Data Guard in Windows and Oracle. At that time, most of those were using Linux, whereas our company uses Windows. So, we were a reference customer for Oracle.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product has been pretty stable. Because we can't afford to have technical issues with production databases. In 20 years of my Oracle DBA experience, I have not encountered any big technical issues that have impacted production.
We faced challenges in migrating to major versions, especially with respect to changing execution plans. That is a one-down thing about Oracle. The execution plan is to host a multi-tenant architecture. Use the same application code, but SQL will be the same, and the data size will vary.
So, at that time, we had the concept of our execution plan in Oracle. So that sometimes gives you a problem. So whenever we do a major upgrade, we have some challenges. It is the risk here. We need to do a lot of testing before moving to the new version. So, we became a bit reluctant to readily upgrade.
How are customer service and support?
I'm not a big fan of Oracle technical support because the first and second levels of technical support are very, very basic.
So, in fact, I get irritated a lot of times till it goes to the third level. Once it goes to the third level, it is good. But then finding a time until that time, we can't wait to have a production issue.
So, in most cases, we just work on the alternate only instead of relying on Oracle technical support. For example, when something like corruption happens in 50 terabyte, the level one guy, technical support, will say, "We have a backup; can you restore it?" Is it possible to restore 50 terabyte? The time it will take to do it. So, without that practical knowledge, these guys will just work on the standard FAQ documentation. So, I'm not a big fan of Oracle support when it comes to levels one and two. Of course, the third level is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
My company wanted to move out of Oracle Data Guard for cloud readiness because Oracle was not ready to move to other clouds at that point in time.
So, we did look at Postgres for our peripheral application, EDB. The normal open-source EDB did not support enterprise features like real-time replication and transparent data encryption. So, just for that, and also as a policy, we wanted to use only the supported version. So we went for Oracle Data Guard. So, I was looking at the project, and we have used EDB for two to or three years now.
I have used Oracle only, but then recently, we looked at other databases like Postgres and MongoDB. We can compare it with that. Oracle is the best for transactional databases in enterprise organizations. Maybe smaller organizations can take MySQL or Postgres. But then, for a company like an enterprise organization having high concurrent transactions and, more importantly, the security aspect, Oracle is the best product.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We had an unlimited license agreement with Oracle.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated and we did a kind of POC with MongoDB. But then the price of MongoDB was costlier, and then we realized that MongoDB is apt for a concurrent request, and mainly, it's a unique streaming kind of thing. Maybe for fraudulent systems, but not for code transaction processes.
So we did a POC with MongoDB, and then the pricing was costly on MongoDB, especially on the Guard. They call it a shard, and the cost is based on a shard. And Oracle has a lot of our DB servers, so they are so large. So, I never used MongoDB in production, but we evaluated it.
What other advice do I have?
It is a good DB solution. It has good availability. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It is a good transactional database.
Oracle do the upgrade. They are too good at introducing new features. So whatever the user base is, get that done in other releases, new releases for Oracle Data Guard. They are very reactive.