Oracle

Fig 1 - Java - write once run anywhere

Oracle wasn’t able to provide someone to talk to us, but did provide plentiful references from its website. Oracle separates security patches from the closed OpenJDK vulnerability group (set up initially by Oracle) from more general patches and updates. What it calls critical patch updates, are usually 2-8, (at most around 30) security patches; whereas its patch set update, which includes everything else, as well as the security patches, could be hundreds of changes, quite often with stability issues. Obviously, just rolling out security patches is less of a management overhead, as it is easier to test a smaller set of changes, and the rest can be rolled out with more time for thorough regression testing etc.

Implementation of the ordinary OpenJDK is is not much of a differentiator but Oracle also has a Performance Java, GraalVM. GraalVM Enterprise is included with the Java SE Universal Subscription at no additional cost. It pre-compiles applications into native code before you start (unlike other approaches, which profile the resources being used by a running program for a quick “just-in-time” (JIT) start next time). This gives you extremely quick startup but is less responsive to changes in optimisation needed by a running program, which JIT deals with easily. GraalVM Enterprise does have profile-guided optimisation, which feeds back into the pre-compilation, but this can’t dynamically respond to a running application’s needs, as JIT compilation can. We think that there will be some applications where GraalVM Enterprise will perform better. For example, with very short-running (“ephemeral”) services, as associated with the rather badly-named “serverless” computing, start-up time is all that matters and GraalVM will work well; but for longer-running services alternative approaches could well deliver more performance over time.

Oracle is a large and respected company, and should provide first-class levels of global support, although it may not be as responsive to the needs of its smaller customers as a smaller company might be.

Oracle bases its universal subscription pricing (for new subscribers) on the number of employees in your company, regardless of whether they use Java or not. The example Oracle gives in its price list is:

Your company has a total employee count of 28,000 as detailed in the Employee for Java SE Universal Subscription definition below.

This includes 23,000 full-time, part-time and temporary employees plus 5,000 agents, contractors and consultants.

Therefore, the price would be 28,000 X $USD 6.75/month X 12 months= $USD 2,268,000/year.

You should care about Oracle Java’s absolute compatibility with OpenJDK because you don’t want to be locked in to one platform or one vendor; and you care about commercial support because you want a secure and effective platform for your applications to run on, so that you can sleep at night. You care about the availability of a performance Java because applications grow and if they are successful they attract more users and get implemented more widely, so that performance and latency issues that were not important initially may become so – and you want to be able to scale up with minimal impact on the business. The Oracle approach to performance Java differs from some others and you should care about this because its approach may suit certain (but not all) use cases particularly well. And, of course, you care about the Oracle pricing model although pricing models can change fairly easily.

The Bottom Line

Fig 2 - Oracle Market Share 2022

Oracle is a major player in Java, although its market share is declining a bit with the rise of Open Source alternatives and changes in its licensing model, see Figure 2.

Oracle separates essential security patches and more general patches/updates, so that they can be applied with different implementation urgencies and different testing regimes, which should result in a better managed Java environment, especially for mission-critical applications. Oracle also brings the stability and, possibly, the arrogance of an extremely large, low risk, stable company. It’s recent pricing of Java support by company size rather than the number of Java users was a shock to many of its customers, and although Oracle has now clarified that this will only be applied to new customers, it is possibly an indicator of Oracle’s marketing attitudes. Its performance Java is good, although its approach is different to, and arguably less in line with Java’s run time optimisation (with just in time compilation and byte codes) philosophy, than some alternative approaches, and customers will have to decide whether it better suits their needs.

Fig 02 - The Oracle Unified Information Management Platform

Figure 2 provides a more detailed view of Oracle’s relevant capabilities.

Oracle has been in the business of delivering data integration, data quality and associated technologies for many years and it offers all the sorts of features you would expect. However, there is a tendency to consider its tooling as more focused on Oracle environments than on supporting third parties. This is particularly notable in the newer products. For example, while the Data Catalog has the sorts of capabilities one would expect, it is limited to supporting Oracle databases (including MySQL), Hive and Kafka. That said, products such as GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator certainly support a broad range of environments and are definitely not limited to those of Oracle.

Going back to Oracle Data Catalog, this is not, in our opinion, an “enterprise” data catalogue: it is not a catalogue of catalogues. For that you would need to implement Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management (OEMM), which does have significant support for third party environments, though it does not support ODPi Egeria. Despite its name, this is as much a data governance solution (with features such as a business glossary, data lineage and so forth) as it is one for metadata management. Unfortunately, however, OEMM is only available on-premises.

It is also worth noting Oracle Solution Patterns. The company has identified some 20 common use cases and is developing and delivering these as relevant offerings. From the perspective of the current discussion the “Data Lake (Raw Data to Curated Information Object Storage or Hadoop)” is most pertinent and its worth commenting that Oracle sees a ladder of capabilities from raw data to curated data to curated information, with increasing refinement providing easier access to, and interpretation of, that information.

Finally, one particular feature that we would like to have seen is some sort of facility to automate the process of data subject access requests (DSARs) within the context of GDPR and other similar regulations.

While you could argue about the features of Oracle’s solutions versus those of competitors (both for and against) the truth is that many of those rivals to do not have the completeness of vision that Oracle can provide. It doesn’t just provide the tools for creating and managing cloud and hybrid analytic environments but also the databases that underpin those analytics along with the capabilities that allow data scientists and others to build both machine learning and conventional analyses and visualisation of your data. The downside, of course, is that some functionality is optimised to run on Oracle databases, as opposed to representing more generic offerings. This also applies when it comes to understanding and exploring application data. The company offers significant capabilities when it comes to supporting its own applications and business models, but functionality to support comparable products from rival application providers is less evident.

The Bottom Line

We have to say that we find Oracle’s different data management options to be confusing. However, the company does offer a complete solution suite and if you are an Oracle user, in particular, you should certainly short-list Oracle for its data management capabilities; if you aren’t then you will probably need to look into its capabilities in more depth but in any case it remains a worthy contender.