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Oracle Exadata vs Snowflake comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Oracle Exadata offers early break-even, reduced costs, increased performance, and significant savings despite complex licensing challenges.
Sentiment score
6.8
Snowflake users praise its scalability and ease of use, though financial gains vary and may require longer usage periods.
The investment is good, which is why people choose this hardware.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
Oracle Exadata support praised for expertise, but critiques focus on delays and process efficiency improvement needs.
Sentiment score
5.7
Snowflake support is responsive and helpful, with high user satisfaction, despite occasional slower response times and ticketing reliance.
This involved creating blueprints for integrating Oracle products into client systems, followed by technical presentations to Oracle teams and stakeholders.
Exadata comes with a platinum gateway and comprehensive support, which often gets immediate attention with severity one cases.
I received great support in migrating data to Snowflake, with quick responses and innovative solutions.
The technical support from Snowflake is very good, nice, and efficient.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Oracle Exadata offers efficient scalability with flexible configurations, easy expansion, and high costs; ensure compatible hardware generations.
Sentiment score
7.8
Snowflake offers excellent scalability, adaptable to varying needs, with minimal challenges but requires cost and resource management attention.
Within a site, scalability is excellent.
Snowflake is very scalable and has a dedicated team constantly improving the product.
The billing doubles with size increase, but processing does not necessarily speed up accordingly.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Oracle Exadata is praised for reliability and stability, with improved models offering redundancy and high availability, minimizing downtime.
Sentiment score
8.2
Snowflake offers high stability and reliability with minimal downtime, rapid recovery, and seamless failover across platforms, especially AWS.
Once installed, Exadata is very stable.
Snowflake is very stable, especially when used with AWS.
Snowflake as a SaaS offering means that maintenance isn't an issue for me.
 

Room For Improvement

Oracle Exadata needs cost management, simplified patching, improved support, better customization, enhanced security, and third-party integration.
Snowflake needs interface improvements, better ETL, machine learning features, pricing clarity, advanced tools, and enhanced documentation and security.
I cannot create an extended rack cluster with one node on one site and another node on a different site.
There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and customization options.
Enhancements in user experience for data observability and quality checks would be beneficial, as these tasks currently require SQL coding, which might be challenging for some users.
Cost reduction is one area I would like Snowflake to improve.
 

Setup Cost

Oracle Exadata's high costs are justified by its performance and reliability, offering value through reduced operational expenses.
Snowflake offers competitive pay-as-you-go pricing with some concerns over transparency, predictability, and potential cost escalation.
I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side.
Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating resource usage.
 

Valuable Features

Oracle Exadata enhances performance, handles large databases efficiently, and simplifies management with advanced features and intelligent storage capabilities.
Snowflake excels in scalability, efficiency, ease of use, AI/ML capabilities, security, and seamless third-party integration, enhancing user experience.
It also offers high backend speed between self-storage units and servers, which is beneficial for processing.
The most valuable features of Oracle Exadata are its high availability and cluster environment.
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses.
Being able to perform AI and Machine Learning in the same location as the data is quite advantageous.
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Exadata
Ranking in Data Warehouse
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
129
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snowflake
Ranking in Data Warehouse
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (1st), AI Synthetic Data (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Oracle Exadata is 16.5%, down from 18.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snowflake is 14.0%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse
 

Q&A Highlights

reviewer2162229 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 26, 2023
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
A solid data warehouse for transactional data that needs to be priced more competitively
Since the product is an appliance, it is very costly. And in the current age, people are cautious about spending this amount of money on any of these types of backend products. Some use cases are in real-time, where all other databases are much faster, but if you talk about the data warehouse, business intelligence, and all other perspectives in the transactional world, Oracle has to reduce the cost. Otherwise, a customer wouldn't want to continue this. If the same thing can be done at half or one-third of the cost, why would people stay with Oracle? Oracle Exadata would not have great value in front of a CFO. Other solutions can guard your data and address security concerns. Security, volumetrics, and so on are also provided by other databases, which are not that costly. Apart from Exadata, Oracle has other tools for business intelligence and other things, which they add on top of Exadata when they're selling a general license. For example, the Vertica database, an HP data warehouse. They have come up with their own analytic engine within the database, which gives an edge for the client to use the data analytics engine as a part of their database. Exadata does not have an analytic engine. Even MySQL has some statistical tools within it. If Exadata integrates analytical tools, it will be good for them.
Snehasish Das - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformation in data querying speed with good migration capabilities
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses. One key feature is the separation of compute and storage, which eliminates storage limitations. It also has tools for migrating data from legacy databases like Oracle. Its stability and efficiency enhance performance greatly. Tools in the AI/ML marketplace are readily available without needing development.
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Answers from the Community

reviewer2162229 - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 26, 2023
Apr 26, 2023
This is a large and complex question and depends on the use case and scale. Each platform has its advantages and there are significant pros and cons for each platform. I am an independent consultant; I teach courses about these platforms and how to select one; and I advise clients. If you would like to have a discussion about your requirements, the tradeoffs, and how to go about getting the be...
See 2 answers
RW
Apr 21, 2023
This is a large and complex question and depends on the use case and scale. Each platform has its advantages and there are significant pros and cons for each platform. I am an independent consultant; I teach courses about these platforms and how to select one; and I advise clients.  If you would like to have a discussion about your requirements, the tradeoffs, and how to go about getting the best platform for your business, please email me at richard@wintercorp.com or book me online (no charge) at solvethepuzzle.biz
Adriano-Simao - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 26, 2023
Exadata is by far the most appropriate fit-for-purpose solution for Dataware House, although it is expansive. But performance, scalability, and availability is the key you must consider when going to Oracle Exadata. Also, a good Field Deliver Support team to attend when needed. And you can run your business on-premise cloud or a public one.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Oracle Exadata?
It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata?
The cost of Oracle Exadata is substantial, particularly in terms of maintenance costs and licensing. This pricing strategy has led to strained relationships with IT companies including HP and Cisco...
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata?
Patching Oracle Exadata can be challenging due to its numerous components including network, blade, CPU, storage, and VMs. The system's complexity extends beyond simple maintenance tasks. The perfo...
What do you like most about Snowflake?
The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Snowflake?
It is complicated to understand how requests impact warehouse size. Unlike competitors such as Microsoft and Databricks ( /products/databricks-reviews ), Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating ...
What needs improvement with Snowflake?
Pricing is quite high for Snowflake Data Cloud, which is an area that could be improved. Snowflake Data Cloud is still beneficial to use, but only if you can afford it. It can be cost-effective if ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Snowflake Computing, Snowflake Data Cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PayPal, EBS, Organic Food Retailer, Garmin, University of Minnesota, Major Semiconductor Company, Deutsche Bank, Starwood, Ziraat Bank, SK Telecom, and P&G.
Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Exadata vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.