What is our primary use case?
For Oracle, we use Oracle Developer. You can use it for both administration and development. There are also professional tools like Toad, but I don't have a license for that.
It's a native program from Oracle to access the database, create users, create tablespaces, and so on. You can work with Oracle Developer by connecting to the cloud or to an on-premises database. You can use the same tool. It just depends on where the database is hosted. You can host it on AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, or Google cloud.
I teach. My main projects are teaching projects. I do many English and German seminars all over Germany for big companies like Siemens, Mercedes, or IBM, teaching people the basics of databases in general and the specifics of Oracle database administration.
What is most valuable?
There are a lot of features in Oracle Developer. You can create tables, users, views, materialized views. You can also do data pump jobs to export jobs, export databases and dump files, create backup jobs, that sort of thing.
Users can usually integrate this tool with other solutions for development or management processes. There are different connections you can create. For example, with Office applications, you can connect to the database. Or if you're programming in Java, you can use a JDK connection to retrieve data from the database and read, store, or update records.
For security, everything's perfect. You can use an SSH connection if you're accessing a server in the cloud, or you just have a normal IP connection if you're running your database on the local network.
What needs improvement?
It's an old tool, and because it's free, there aren't many great changes. I'm fine with the features that are already there.
But there is room for improvement in the performance of this product.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for more than five years. I work with Oracle databases as a DBA, up to the new version 23, starting from 11g.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Oracle Developer is a graphical user interface that usually runs on the client side. If you have a lot of workload, you cannot use the graphical interface.
For example, to insert a million record sets into a database, you need to create an SQL script file and run it on SQL*Plus, the terminal program for Oracle. Anything with a heavy workload won't run over the graphical user interface.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used all major databases, including Microsoft databases, SQL Server, PostgreSQL databases, and MySQL databases. I do administration, development, performance tuning, backup, and other administrative tasks.
How was the initial setup?
For Oracle Developer Cloud Service, users can just download it, extract the files, and then hit the execute button. There's no installation needed. It's like a portable application that can run on different operating systems.
What was our ROI?
Oracle has introduced a new architecture called the multi-tenant feature. In the past, Oracle was a single instance, one database per instance solution. But now, with the multi-tenant architecture, you can migrate many databases to one instance. This saves a lot of money and administrative work.
Instead of having one instance for each database and having to perform many upgrades, patches, and backups, you now have one single instance to manage. That's much easier and more cost-effective.
So, the amount of money you save depends on how many instances you migrate together. For example, if you put ten databases together into one cloud, you can save up to 50% to 70% of your previous costs for licenses and other things.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
here's one big tool called Toad. It is a professional tool. I think it costs something like €900 to €1000. You can do a lot more with Toad than with Oracle Developer.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate it a five out of ten. The tool is a Java application, and it's very slow. Starting the program is slow, and executing commands is also very slow.
Sometimes, I lose the cursor in the editor, and it disappears for no reason. It's hard to guess where I'm in the text, and I feel a bit lost. I'm not sure if it's because of the virtual machine, as I often run Developer on virtual machines, or if it's an issue with the program itself. Also, sometimes it hangs up.
From time to time. But again, I'm not always sure if it's an issue of the virtual machine or the program itself because you never really know why an application is crashing.
