Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.
The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.
While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.
Oracle Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads.
While Oracle Database is available for Linux, it’s proprietary software. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.
1. MySQL
MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS). The basic program runs as a server providing multiuser access to a number of databases.
2. MariaDB
MariaDB Server is one of the most popular database servers in the world. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. Notable users include Wikipedia, WordPress.com and Google.
MariaDB seeks high compatibility with MySQL, ensuring a drop-in replacement capability with library binary parity and exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands.
3. PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) based on POSTGRES, Version 4.2, developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department.
It has more than 30 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It is the most feature-rich robust open-source database.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Oracle's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Business Intelligence is business analytics software that offers an integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System. |
 | Business Process Management is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. |
| Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads. |
 | JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. |
 | OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server. |
 | MySQL is a relational database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. |
 | Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations. |
 | TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. |
| Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and web server/content management server. |