Training on Oracle tech is via certified classes, provided “free” by your employer as part of their licensing deal; not online discovery.
Source: sold to and worked with Oracle Inc. for several years, got a front row seat at the sausage factory.
https://livesql.oracle.com --> A SQL scratchpad that also includes scripts and tutorials.
Oracle Live Labs (https://apexapps.oracle.com/pls/apex/dbpm/r/livelabs/home) --> Granted, while it's easier googled as "Oracle Live Labs" than to remember that URL, it does, however, provide free Hands-On Labs for users.
https://oracle.github.io/learning-library/ --> The instructions for the Hands-On Labs above and more can be found in the learning-library
asktom.oracle.com --> I fully free Q&A portal where you can ask Oracle Database employees for help. Furthermore, it offers regular "Office Hours" live webinars and an entire course of learning Oracle Database: https://asktom.oracle.com/databases-for-developers.htm
agree. i have a year or two with Oracle Apex. at a pervious job, we were using Java to develop a web app but a executive saw how fast you can create a web page/app with Oracle Apex. we switch over since we already using Oracle for database.
Enterprise software is not targeting you (techies). its for CxOs.
A lot of the time when businesses by Oracle, they’re buying into the middleware rather than the RDBMS.
Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA Weblogic.
I was the DBA for a Siebel instance for ten years.
I would say J.D. Edwards, but that's AS400/DB2.
SAP is also a big driver, although they don't want to be (so much so that they bought Sybase).
Sometimes with somewhat sensible reasons, like Oracle combining clustering and in-memory encryption, but it still means you don't get to choose...
Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive. I'd choose Postgres any day, but I worked with Oracle a lot and it never was a main culprit in my work. It has its issues, sure, but they're solvable.
Full of bugs, some that destroy speed, some that destroy data, some that just make a feature that you need unusable. More heavyweight than lead (although it gets fast after you throw enough hardware). Lacking any capable or usable management interface (but then, that excludes everyone except for postgres and mysql). Impossible to program. Impossible to predict how your program will run.... And my favorite, absolutely fragile, any wrong code you run there can take everything out of the air.
And yeah, stupidly expensive and comes with the Oracle legal team.
This would've been sufficient, honestly.
Did I say it has bugs?
Anyway the most recent pair I found on the wild was a problem that made indexes of georeferenced data fail at random, pushing your queries into a non-indexed search and breaking things like materialized views, and one that causes some inconsistency on testing clobs for null or empty string (what made them impossible to test for either when it applies). But there's a well known one that breaks optimization plans at random and goes with the last try (it doesn't matter if that it will scan that table 100000 rows 1000 times), and there's some bug where if you create some tables, populate them, drop them and repeat enough times you will lose your database. But that's just from the top of my head.
Oh, of course, that isn't including designed behaviors like the one that takes your database offline if you don't do backups often enough (where "often enough" is something that you can estimate but never be sure about its frequency).
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/how_amazon_broke_free...
Sybase, Ingres
I worked at both a Sybase shop and an Oracle shop. I far preferred Sybase.
I spent about a decade working on a large system built on top of oracle. Once you get used to its idiosyncracies it is not actually that bad. It has a good query optimizer, so even badly written queries tend to perform ok. And if there is any DB feature you want, it probably has it. Whether you can afford that feature is a different matter.
Not that most Oracle DB ppl use it anyway.
Everybody has problems.
Which one? Good question. The mainframe, as/400, and Windows versions are all on separate source code last I heard.
https://www.enterprisedb.com/news/enterprisedb-and-ibmr-coll...
Having used many RDBMS, one thing I very much liked about Oracle was the bitmap index. Very very useful for some performance issues that a b-tree cannot solve.
Oracle was massive in the private sector 10 years ago, and it probably still is once you dig past the surface layer of nosql
Don’t forget that for a long term it was either Oracle or DB2
1. I have never actually used their dialect and have heard absolutely terrible things about it
2. There is no non-enterprise DBMS available that uses something close to their dialect so I figure actually hiring Oracle DBAs would be a nightmare.
These two factors combine to make me absolutely baffled at how completely Oracle has seemed to dominate every market but the private one (i.e. government, especially defense and educational). Have I been missing something about ways to actually get real world experience with Oracle?