71 engineers on Hacker News describe using Oracle Database first-hand: 3 endorse it, 25 regret it, 8 are mixed.
“Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.”
regret · production · jiggawatts · 2026-09-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS”
regret · production · thedougd · 2025-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Oracle (the database) is actually a really solid product for the most part.”
endorse · production · Yeroc · 2025-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had find in the code where the change was to be applied, change the code, recompile the package, and then restart the service”
regret · production · AsthmaBoy · 2025-06-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Oracle is infamous for their licensing costs and audits, TDE for example I believe is a separate licensing cost”
regret · production · joshsm5 · 2025-05-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But we're talking about Oracle here so that's par for the course.”
regret · production · 3acctforcom · 2025-03-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We learned when we switched away from Oracle DB due to performance issues.”
regret · production · foxfired · 2025-02-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We were on Oracle for 15 years. Then the license costs became too burdensome, so we moved to Postgres.”
regret · production · 15 yr · irrational · 2024-03-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Oracle's pricing made it non-economical, or so I was told.”
regret · production · slotrans · 2022-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have you ever been through an Oracle audit? ... I will literally never again willingly work with such a company.”
regret · production · SteveNuts · 2022-02-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“by which point we'd already migrated to MySQL for many of the workloads because the database was having at best 95% reliability”
regret · production · lazide · 2021-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the port was completed and successful they had no end of trouble managing it”
regret · production · amichal · 2021-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a large number of Oracle database for customers. ... for all the terribleness of Oracle, they actually do build a very stable and performant database, assuming you can afford it.”
mixed · production · mrweasel · 2021-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think I've found 5 bugs in the Oracle database in the last 4 months, including multiple queries that returned incorrect results.”
regret · production · roflc0ptic · 2021-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We ran Oracle databases and a few other products for multiple decades, until Oracle conducted an audit and decided to shake us down”
regret · production · 20 yr · mr_overalls · 2021-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Oracle is pretty good, but the pricing is no in our favour.”
mixed · production · cygned · 2021-04-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The first web application I did, that went in production 22 years ago, was in it's entirety based on stored procedures... you will be stuck with that database. Hardly portable.”
regret · production · qpiox · 2020-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“As a developer I found it easy to work with. But the cost to run in production is eye-watering.”
mixed · personal · throwaway201103 · 2020-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I ran about 50 servers running Oracle Standard Edition... I will never look back. There were so many things that we wanted to do, but were 'enterprise only' features.”
regret · production · briffle · 2020-09-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Wish oracle would just do this for us internally.”
regret · production · jzoch · 2019-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Oracle the database is great: performant, scalable. A bit pricey and complex to manage but that's acceptable”
mixed · production · elchupanebre · 2019-05-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the oracle core database has billions of R&D dollars... Oracle will still destroy pg for most OLAP workloads, now you have to decide if the insane licencing cost is worth it.”
mixed · production · 18 yr · judgardner · 2018-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have had instances of data corruption in production servers with both OracleSQL and MySQL.”
regret · production · dejaime · 2018-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do have Oracle... That has a very quirky license, but that hasn't left me anything to do for 3 years since it moved server. It did 7 years on the old server!”
mixed · production · 10 yr · jimnotgym · 2018-08-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I will never again use or support an Oracle product after they literally, specifically cost a former employer $.75mm, on Cyber Monday by giving us factually false information.”
regret · production · rosser · 2017-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“db2 is far easier to manage than oracle and the iSeries we have operate with much smaller staffs than the AIX/Oracle setups”
regret · production · Shivetya · 2015-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My org has paid millions for software and support on the Oracle products we run, and have "dedicated" support team ... it's worthless.”
regret · production · waz0wski · 2015-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've supported clustered Oracle on AWS handing massive numbers of micropayment transactions and seen weird shit in prod where it "kind-of failed"”
mixed · production · ballard · 2014-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our problem was developing and maintaining a schema that holds lots of metadata many levels deep.”
regret · production · rgo · 2013-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Things I have become an expert in that are now useless to me and probably not valued by an employer”
regret · production · pkteison · 2013-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our ERP/MRP on Oracle ($millions in licensing/maintenance)... it sure is nice not to have to rely on an enormous, leeching, sales-driven corporation”
regret · production · eitally · 2013-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is one reason we've stuck with oracle, due to the fact that it has a CONNECT BY statement. In practice, that's been okay”
endorse · production · juiceandjuice · 2012-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Java, Oracle, Struts, SOAP and the most serious, enterprise solutions with rock solid support you can think of.”
mixed · production · davedx · 2011-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive”
regret · production · tibbon · 2011-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a tool I incorporated into one system would see a parameter to a web request and would issue a command to Oracle telling it to log everything”
endorse · production · btilly · 2010-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our Oracle installation sucks and we are in the process of porting away from it. It's just not worth it to try to tweak it to work better.”
regret · production · zaphar · 2010-01-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy”
neutral · production · anonzzzies · 2026-09-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run on SAP as the big commercial DBMS, but also have some oracle instances.”
neutral · production · moooo99 · 2026-08-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for years we were mostly a Oracle shop. With some SQL Server thrown in.”
neutral · production · nirav72 · 2025-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7.”
neutral · production · unxdfa · 2023-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated all our databases from Oracle to MS SQL Server.”
neutral · production · kennethh · 2022-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We got rid of them when we migrated from Oracle to AWS Aurora.”
neutral · production · Shorel · 2022-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated a large database from Oracle to Postgres. It took 2 years. By far and away the biggest issue was rewriting queries”
neutral · production · irrational · 2022-06-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Synapse/power build but we use oracle, we opt for the disaster oracle form 4”
neutral · production · ngcc_hk · 2021-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It helped me immensly when dealing with slow queries later in life in Postgres, SQL Server and even Oracle.”
neutral · production · scotty79 · 2021-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've only ever seen PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB/Oracle be deployed successfully as single instances in prod that are scaled vertically”
neutral · production · KronisLV · 2021-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“completely re-initalised its Oracle DB connection every time etc.”
neutral · production · mpweiher · 2021-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had BMC software want the highest levels of access to Oracle DBs to do simply monitoring”
neutral · production · rodgerd · 2021-01-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run Linux on POWER exclusively as a cost-savings mechanism to reduce the Oracle bill.”
neutral · production · Spooky23 · 2020-08-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I really like PHP, but do .NET with Oracle at work.”
neutral · production · milankragujevic · 2019-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But in company we use oracle, the devart.data.oracle.efcore is not very good”
neutral · production · slaveoftime · 2018-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were on Oracle 8, so just finding the compatible drivers was half of the battle”
neutral · production · seanharr11 · 2018-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“from Java / ATG Dynamo 10+ servers and 20+ Oracle servers to .NET with 3-4 web/app servers”
neutral · production · drawkbox · 2018-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“then in Delphi/Oracle after college.”
neutral · production · Clubber · 2017-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We connect to a enterprise test instance of oracle.”
neutral · production · epalmer · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using SQL over 20 years in Oracle/Informix/Sybase/IBMDB2/MSSQL”
neutral · production · jasode · 2016-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Web infrastructure developer (we use oracle dbs, django, various RPC services etc)”
neutral · production · dagmx · 2016-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“eventually we got to the point where even the Oracle database uses the certificate on the SmartCard for authentication”
neutral · production · Annatar · 2016-08-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“there will be copious amounts of SSAS cubes and Oracle warehouses for the foreseeable future”
neutral · production · angrybits · 2015-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We will be killing our last Oracle this year.”
neutral · production · davidgerard · 2015-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I switched the coding from COBOL to VB4 and Oracle and then Java”
neutral · production · kpgraham · 2015-05-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when we want something with support we use Oracle.”
neutral · production · krzyk · 2014-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In production I've used Oracle DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Google Cloud Datastore, Redis, RedShift and Elasticsearch.”
neutral · production · nielskrijger · 2014-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using R to pull data out of SQLite, SQL Server and Oracle db's every single day, for years.”
neutral · production · 8 yr · withme · 2013-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We just completed our migration from Oracle DB to Postgres.”
neutral · production · eduardordm · 2013-06-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“its performance is comparable to the tuned-and-managed Oracle servers that I am pulling from.”
neutral · production · saosebastiao · 2012-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We swapped out the E450s for 440s for Oracle when we moved to InterNAP, and all seemed to be well.”
neutral · production · reeses · 2012-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had a query in Oracle that executed several hours. Our Oracle DBA found a way to tweak Oracle that shrinked it to 30 minutes.”
neutral · production · Ingaz · 2012-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I cut my DB teeth on Oracle and mysql”
neutral · production · arjn · 2012-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Oracle and we use HBase. We would never replace Oracle with HBase for all of our data needs.”
neutral · production · linuxhansl · 2011-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Most of the systems are built using combinations (pick two) of PHP, JSP, Ruby, Perl, MySQL and Oracle.”
neutral · production · scorchin · 2010-02-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?