Why Banks or Financial Companies prefer Oracle than other RDBMS for their "Core" systems? [closed]

Question

I'd like to know why most Banks or Financial companies prefer Oracle than other RDBMS for their core systems (the absolutely minimum features that a Bank must support). I found a few answers that didn't satisfy me. For example: Oracle has more features. But features for what? Can't you implement that in application level if you were not using Oracle?

Could someone please describe a bit more technical but still on high-level overview of what the bank needs and how Oracle would solve it and the others can't or don't have the features yet?

Minor question: would you use ORM if you have to develop a banking solution?

I came from the web-app (web 2.0) crowd who normally hear news about MySQL, PostgreSQL or even key-value/column-oriented storage solution. I have almost zero knowledge on how Banks or Financial companies operates from technical perspective.

Thank you, Ed

Answer 1

Oracle has a reputation for better reliability and security. Historically, it has outperformed and out-scaled any other SQL engine. This is changing, but the perception is still there. In many markets, Oracle is still perceived as the gold standard. Financial services seems to be one of them.

Answer 2

Corporate Culture... History... Bias...

AND Oracle is a very good DB, but so are plenty of others these days.

However, if the financial institution has been around forever, and they've used Oracle forever (since it WAS once in a class of its own), there's an investment there.

Also, since Oracle once dominated this market, people with experience in these industries are already more likely to be familiar with it and comfortable with it, so when building a new system it's a "comfortable" choice.

Answer 3

PostgreSQL is also used, Caixa (a large bank in Brazil) uses it: PostgreSQL in Mission-Critical Financial Systems

Answer 4

Which ever answer you receive, will most likely be biast based on the OP's personal comfort with the RDBMS used.

Any corporate entity has more measures in paperwork, (From 1Tc to R2D2) to fill out, and get approved when changing working solutions than buying a house.

So if the environment you are talking about was using Ms Access, you would find it hard to convince them to change.

Given all that, there was a time (not to distant past/even still today) where these kind of decisions was not made by developers, but by the costing company.

Another joke. Given a programmers age, Have you ever heard of COBOL

Answer 5

In addition to all the reasons that were mentioned Oracle is more preferred over MS SQL and other products like IBM DB, PostgreSQL and others is that:

• Oracle is the oldest since 1977, so we are talking about 37 years of development, while MS SQL Server since 1989 based on Sybase-SQL Server a joined project between MS, Ashton-Tate, and Sybase.
• Oracle has been specialized with Database development, whereas Microsoft was more focusing on Windows OS and Office in Addition to Variety of programming languages under the .Net framework, and packed under Visual Studio.
• The technical excess aspects in Oracle database over MS-SQL Server are mainly that Oracle is cross platform, as per database experts it executes queries faster, and it has two thing that MS-SQL Server doesn't have yet , One is how oracle handles stored procedures it can group SPs in packages so that each package with all the stores procedures wrapped inside it can be called as a unit and executed explicitly by the application, which can't be done is MS SQL Server so far.
• The commercial marketing of Oracle over MS SQL Server coming mainly from the major developers of ERP solutions for companies tends to prefer Oracle over MS SQL Server because it is easier to deploy and implement on the company's infrastructure due to that Oracle is cross-platform so they think it's quicker to install and run Oracle Database while it won't be as easy with MS SQL server Database unless the entire platform is Windows that depends on windows NT and .Net framework which might not be always used or available in the company's infrastructure.

Answer 6

ORACLE has a very high performance when it comes to speed. Also the capacity in some fields and has more functionality on its procedures PL/SQL. The mysql/sql server also has stored procedures but the difference is ORACLE has more functions and executes faster compared to others. It can operate more higher buffering multiple transactions on its procedures and queries. Aside from that its almost the same with the other SQL's