I just can’t seem to comprehend how Oracle can be so wealthy off of making a database when it’s theoretically easy for a company to store its own information.
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Because why bother? Why bother paying your own employees to maintain or develop such things, and have them work across software versions and updates that may or may not be in their control. If you can pay a company for the convenience of not having to worry about it, then do it. Same reason most of these companies are profitable over these types of services. It’s cheaper and easier to have your own folks maintain and store it. It’s not just Oracle either. They in turn use other services to store and manage their software stack. Cloud companies like GCP, AWS, and Azure make billions and billions by providing software/infrastructure as a service.
To begin with, databases are not spreadsheets. Very different things. Also it takes time, effort and money to develop any software. So using a proven off-the-shelf product usually makes a lot of sense.
If you’ve ever dealt with a huge Excel file, you will see how slow it gets, especially if you have loads of complex formulas.
There are of course many other reasons, but just being able to access the data quickly is important.
When there’s a lot of data to be stored and sorted, it can get quite tedious for many companies. Oracle simply makes storing information more efficient and time saving, especially for larger companies.
Excel is not a database program and should not be used as one.
You can force it to do whatever you want but it won’t be good at it. They sell Access if you want a database program
Databases are far far more efficient at storing and more importantly, quickly accessing information
Making your own database and making a database that runs well and isn’t riddled with security issues are two very different things. People pay Amazon/Microsoft/Oracle/Apache/etc to buy a database software that is more efficient and secure than they could make for the same cost
Spreadsheets have very serious limitations, notably that they cannot be accessed by more than one person at a time.
Doing so can corrupt the file, now imagine having an accounting system built out of hundreds of linked Excel docs that needs to be accessed by a team of 50 accountants. Imagine trying to fix that or reverse engineer it later when there’s problem.
Excel just doesn’t scale that way, which is why you need a database for large datasets and applications like Line of Business Software.
Developing your own in-house software for this is also often a fools errand. It might be cheaper in the short term, but in the long-term factoring in paying/losing developers, developing new features, code efficiency, etc it will cost the company much much more than just buying a canned software platform in the first place.
So why Oracle?
There’s a lot of alternatives these days like PostGreSQL, MS SQL, MySQL, etc etc and many of them are far more cost effective than Oracle.
But a lot of big data applications are legacy meaning that they were purchased ages ago, or are the industry standard, and getting away from running them for a large business just isn’t economical.
The business impact of switching to something else costs a lot more than just continuing with Oracle, which is a fact big software vendors take full advantage of. They know they have their whale customer by the balls so they can basically charge whatever they want.
Databases store much, MUCH more information than a spreadsheet reasonably can, and they can manipulate, search, and provide other features around that information more effectively.
You don’t just want to *store* the information. You want to be able to use it for various purposes. You often want guarantees of security or reliability. You want to be able to connect information from different “spreadsheets” (*tables*, in database terminology). You want to be able to do all sorts of performance optimizations. You might need to spread your database across the world for rapid response times, which requires a whole other set of tools. And so on.
Spreadsheets start getting pretty slow if you’re doing anything complex at even a few thousand rows. Databases, on the other hand, can routinely contain *millions* of rows even for relatively low-scale purposes. At scales like that, you need much more sophisticated tools than a spreadsheet can provide.
The most obvious reason is that excel is pretty limited in the amount of rows you can have. It is also a visual representation of the information which isn’t necessary. Databases handle traffic from multiple users better. Databases utilize indexes to make accessing data faster and more efficient. The list goes on.
Excel, Access, etc are fine for small businesses that have a few databases up to a few hundred MB or a GB each, but they don’t operate well at scale. Oracle has built its reputation on being able to house and efficiently run MASSIVE databases… We’re talking in the order of tens or hundreds of millions of cells and many terabytes per instance, with the ability to have hundreds of even thousands of employees working in those databases simultaneously.
Other alternatives just can’t do that.
>when they can just use spreadsheets like Excel
Excel and similar spreadsheet software works fine for storing small datasets but it is not designed or intended to work on the massive volumes of data that large (or frankly, even small) companies need for day-to-day operations. We’re not just talking about the amount of data, but how much new data is being added to it on a daily/hourly/secondly basis (in data science, this is called “velocity”).
>or make their own spreadsheet software?
This is sort of like asking “why would I buy a car from Ford when I could build one in my garage?” The answer is usually some combination of “I don’t have the tools or expertise to do it myself,” “if I spent all my time making (and maintaining) it myself I wouldn’t have time to do anything else,” and “someone else has already designed, built, and tested it, why should I redo all of that work?”
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