What Does 2016 Reveal About Oracle Database Usage Across China’s Industries?

Cloud and Enmo's intelligent diagnosis platform Bethune released the 2016 China Oracle Database Usage Report, sampling 18 major domestic industries, 485 users (individuals or enterprises), and 1,841 Oracle database instances. The analysis draws on 3,356 health‑check records to offer a comprehensive view of Oracle usage in China.

1. Industry Characteristics

Users span finance, electronics, telecommunications, government and other sectors, showing Oracle's pivotal role in Chinese IT. Over a thousand databases and thousands of health checks indicate that finance, telecom, IT and energy sectors prioritize database health more than others.

2. System Configuration

Database Version

Oracle 11gR2 remains the dominant version, while adoption of 12.1 has risen since 2015 but still accounts for less than 15% of installations. Versions older than 11g are rare, and 12c adoption is expected to stay limited until 12.2 is released.

Operating System

Linux and AIX are now the primary OS platforms for Oracle databases. Linux has become the leading choice since 2011, surpassing commercial OSes, while AIX remains prevalent in finance and telecom due to high availability requirements.

Host Configuration

CPU and memory allocations reflect industry needs: electronics manufacturing averages 84 CPU cores per database, while the energy sector averages 270 GB memory per database. Telecom and finance show more balanced, rational resource provisioning.

Storage Configuration

Since Oracle 11.2, ASM has largely replaced raw devices for RAC architectures. Raw devices are now mainly found on AIX + 10G systems, while Windows deployments continue to use file‑system storage.

3. Data Scale

Database size reflects workload pressure. Broadcast media, telecom and transportation host the largest databases, with broadcast media dominated by LOB storage. Finance averages 628 GB per database, while telecom reaches a single‑instance peak of 228 TB.

4. High Availability

Most customers enable archive logging, and 51% of instances use Oracle RAC for high availability. However, Data Guard adoption remains low, indicating limited familiarity or conservative investment in disaster‑recovery solutions.

5. Faults

Top‑10 fault types are dominated by space‑related and network‑connection errors, which are simple to resolve but occur frequently, even in well‑managed telecom environments, highlighting a need for stronger monitoring.

The full report also covers security, schema design, SQL tuning, hidden parameters, performance metrics and abnormal shutdown analysis. The complete document can be downloaded from Bethune’s website .