Oracle Database Appliance Reviews

The biggest value that customers are seeing, is that it's easy to install, quick to deploy, and easy to consolidate platforms; as opposed to building an environment from scratch. When you get the ODA, all you must do is plug it in and run several commands to get it up and running. This allows for the time to deploy to be really fast. With the addition of the X6-2S, 2M and 2HA, there is a ODA platform that will suit SMB, mid-size and now large scale customer workloads.

Particularly interesting, is that now ODA 2S/M supports Standard Edition (SE2) database configurations, which is great for SMB and mid-size consolidation plays.

Moreover, the ODA X2-HA adds a new whole area for us and our customers, as it adds an all flash storage array option and virtualization capabilities; further improving consolidation densities.

The platform is primarily used for departmental mid-size companies, although I do know large companies that use it, because it’s a great platform for consolidating. It is unable to expand by much, because of the way the ODA configures when you have two nodes and X number of storage. Oracle has done a good job of letting it expand storage, but the number of nodes is still limited to two. This continues to be an issue for customers.

I have worked with ODA for the last five to six years.

It’s a very stable product. As with any other technology, in initial phases, it needed to be tested; but it has become a very solid platform with a large customer base.

The initial idea, was that ODA would be a scalable solution; allowing customers tostart with a small number of CPU’s and grow as the demand increased. As aprimarily consolidation platform, you can consolidate more, by moving move up the CPU’s as needed; pricing goes along with that too.

It’s a very solid platform. Oracle has been good at managing the support.

ODA was initially designed for setup to be easy. Once brought in-house, you plug it in, set up your network connection, run one or two commands, and then set up is complete. Even if it's in a virtualized environment, it's still easy to set up. The quick setup is the beauty and the added value that ODA brings, as opposed to other conversion or engineering systems, which take a little bit more time.

Upgrades are the same; due to its automation, many of the commands, designed by the Oracle development team, allow for easy upgrades for the entire end-to-end stack.

It's a very low-cost, simplistic solution, especially from the infrastructure side. If you have minimal staff and a mid-size environment, this is a perfect platform.

Offers easy deployment and setup.

It hosts many applications and deploys ODA quickly.

Patching cycles have many bugs that need to be addressed.

The most valuable feature is the ability to use it as a virtualization platform. This is great because you can run the Oracle Database layer as ODA_BASE domain and use Oracle VM templates to build Oracle applications as VMs so you can also have the application layer in the same platform.

It is easy in terms of management of virtual infrastructure. With "oakcli" is the all-in-one CLI to manipulate the virtual environment of the ODA.

It had a lot of bugs, especially with the old patch bundles. There was no support for connecting it to an FC tape drive for backups.

The ODA X3-2 has been up and running since August 2013. This was the first model of the appliance.

We had issues with the virtual infrastructure. Sometimes the shared repositories go into status Unknown, VMs crashing etc. Also the automatic failover of the VMs sometimes failed.

We had no issues with scalability. It allows only two disk enclosures for storage space, and for servers you can upgrade the RAM.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10.

Our previous solutions were building a high availability environment for Oracle Database with blocks, server storage OS, network configuration, etc.

The setup was very easy. It is great to have a fully configured and tested HA environment for Oracle Database in two days. All the built-in automation scripts do it for you.

If you compare the pricing of ODA vs traditional architecture it can be a bit high but you get more value by minimizing the risk, a short implementation time, and all-in-one patching.

There are no solutions like ODA.

Overall it is a great product for consolidating Oracle Databases.

With the newer models there are a lot of optimizations both in hardware and software. For example the cluster interconnect card went from 10GbE in ODA X3-2 to InfiniBand QDR in ODA X5-2. The "oakcli" has added features with the new patch bundles.

In Turkey, there are some highway toll collection systems that use Oracle Database Appliance.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Database Appliance is the ease of management.

Oracle Database Appliance is stopping support for the standard edition and only continuing support for the RAC One Node. They did not inform us and we are having problems with our customers. We are not having to change our systems from standard to something else.

I have been using Oracle Database Appliance for approximately five years.

We did not have any stability issues with Oracle Database Appliance.

Oracle Database Appliance is scalable according to the license purchased. We didn't need any extra storage, but if we need storage we can add it.

We have many systems and toll collection systems using the solution. The call centers that use the solution have approximately 100 people using each environment.

The hardware support of Oracle Database Appliance was not good five years ago, but now it is.

The support is responsive and solves the issues. Most of the support is automated, and when we send the snapshot automation fails they are easily solved.

I rate the support from Oracle Database Appliance a five out of five.

Positive

I have not used another solution similar to Oracle Database Appliance.

The Oracle Database Appliance has an easy installation. It took approximately four to five hours. If we do not do a re-image it can be done in one to two hours.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house with one person.

I don’t know ODA and alternative system prices. But Oracle the database license is quite expensive and a lot of my customers plan to migrate to open source databases like PostgreSQL.

I rate the price of Oracle Database Appliance a four out of five.

I would recommend people to use this solution it is good.

I rate Oracle Database Appliance an eight out of ten.

ODA has two most valuable features. First, it’s very easy to deploy. Once received, you can unpack it, rack it, install it in less than one day and having a fully usable machine very quickly.

The second feature is its scalability: you can start with a small configuration (regarding Oracle licensing) and then enable Oracle CPU depending on your needs.

Not my organization because I work as a consultant. But one of my customers who has bought an ODA started a database for 10 shops and then he grew the number of CPUs enabled each time he opened some new shops.

Only one time during an upgrade, because the customer made some modifications in the machine configuration and he forgot that ODA is an appliance, not a traditional platform. So you have to be careful when you want to modify the system. A better way to do it is to ask support, when in doubt.

Usually my customers switched to ODA because they didn’t have a full-time DBA in their organization, and they wanted an easy to use solution that can be installed and upgraded easily.

The initial setup is very straightforward. As said above, you can deploy the machine in less that one day. But, as it’s an appliance, if you are not very familiar with this kind of deployment, read the docs and ask support first.

Usually, the customers I work for who chose ODA have licensed their database with the enterprise edition and they usually buy the diagnostic pack and deploy an enterprise manager cloud control to easily administer their OD platform.

We are using it in our companies. We work with others, especially at the enterprise level.

The product is very light. By that I mean, in terms of response rate, it's light. 

Oracle can handle a lot of data.

The implementation process is easy.

There are more freeware options out there these days that are less costly if you are a company that can work in the cloud environment. They are much better than Oracle in the price to value ratio.

Even though the solution can handle a lot of data, it's just too expensive currently.

There should be more analysis for debugging. Right now, this is only available in the Enterprise Edition. If you have the Standard Edition, like us, you're stuck with some limited functionalities. In order to access the best features, you need to level up to the Enterprise Edition.

The software comes with only four cores, which is not really very advisable. It doesn't really help in terms of the modern way of working. While the machines are getting better, at the same time they tend to run a lot of test databases, like virtual machines, and Oracle doesn't work well with all of that. It's only JBM that they work well with.

Technical support is not very helpful if you only have the Standard Edition.

They should work ell with other machines. If it could integrate better, it might be more user-friendly for businesses. 

I've been using the solution for more than five years. 

It's stable. We've had hitches, however. We have been been using the Standard Edition, so there have been many hitches in that due to the fact that you need the Enterprise Edition and a diagnostic pack to do what we need in order to investigate. That's where we find most of our issues. It's very hard to populate. If you look at the other DBs in the same price range, the functionality is a lot more in terms of diagnostic tools, in terms of helping in resolving issues. The Standard Edition does not solve those problems.

The solution is scalable to an extent. If you look at the Enterprise Edition, yes, it's scalable at the cost, not scalable per se, just scalable at a huge cost. If you're meeting the revenues, if you're large enough to afford it, that's fine. Otherwise, no, it does not scale well.

We have three people, off and on, who work on the product. It doesn't have that many user requirements. We are still not such a huge company, so three people off and on are enough. We have one person on it during the day, one at night, and one extra that can cover.

We need technical support sometimes, however, not much help is covered with the Standard Edition. The best advice we get is "Move to Enterprise, then we can solve all your problems." That's where it is. I wouldn't rate technical support that high.

The implementation process was easy in terms of deployment, however, it's a physical installation which just adds to the overall cost of the solution. 

It's not just the solution that's expensive, it's the resources you need to think about that are expensive. In COVID times, these costs were especially rough. It's hard to justify a huge cost, especially in an enterprise. 

I'm a customer. I'm not a partner or a reseller of Oracle.

I would advise potential new users to make a good business plan. Think about the cost, especially the per-transaction cost. And what size of database that you're going to need. Oracle is a Ferrari. A Ferrari is an unreliable and expensive machine. It's an expensive purchase. As you scale, the Oracle costs will also go up. It's not like you have a fixed cost now and you not going to have a fixed cost later. You will have a fixed cost on the Oracle and it will keep on increasing. From that perspective, the business plan needs to be right. 

There are some regulatory areas that we happen to be in that means we can't move to the cloud. That is why we are still with Oracle. If we could move to the cloud, we would not be with Oracle. 

My biggest consideration is the price/value ratio, especially nowadays. Oracle was good when the only other alternative was IBM, and now, not so much. I would say if you're a large business then maybe it's a seven out of ten. If you're a small business then maybe a four out of ten. In general, I would rate it a six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as an operational system.

The performance of the system is the solution's most valuable aspect. In combination with the database, it gives perfect results. It's a better system than using other kinds of integrated systems. In general, the ODA control is much simpler to use and offers up the best performance.

Technical support could be much better. The maintenance for an enterprise system isn't so great. It's also much expensive.

A future release should improve the availability of networking interfaces.

Hardware expansions availability should be in-line with product support. 

The solution should have the ability to offer an integrated management dashboard with virtualized systems and oracle DB manager in all DB supported versions.

The machine should have a visual monitoring interface, not also for hardware but also to DB and virtualized hosts.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues over the past two years.

We're not too pleased with technical support. The cost to have access to them is way too much money.

The initial setup was fairly quick. It was easy to deploy.

The pricing of the solution is fair but the technical support pricing is quite high.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a very good system.

We value the following features:

• It is easily scalable.
• All patches (OS, DB) are bundled by Oracle, so patching dependencies are resolved.
• Oracle guarantees that the setup works if you keep up with the patches.

Setup of the server and database was easy. At a later point in time we decided to virtualize it, and the basic setup of the box was also quite easy.

The following issues need some attention:

• There is no option to combine a second ODA X2 in real application cluster mode. Therefore high availability is limited to same-cabinet RAC, and to offsite standby.
• Storage expansion was not possible for ODA X2 so we frequently ran into storage limitations.
• Even in an RAC setup it is not easy to avoid downtime because OS patching requires both nodes to be patched with very short overlapping.
• Apparently there is a way to avoid downtime, but we did not explore that option anymore because we added a remote standby.

We used the solution from 2012 to 2016.

We had some stability issues.

In the beginning, soon after initial setup and go-live, a bug caused one of the nodes to use all cores while on the other node only the requested cores where activated. This led to instability.

Also, later a hard disk caused instability while it was "dying".

We had an issue with scalability, but only in terms of storage.

Technical support was excellent.

We didn't use a previous solution. This solution was recommended by a consulting company because of ease of scalability and patching.

Initial setup was easy.

Pricing was reasonable given the high quality hardware parts used and the high availability.

I was not involved in evaluation of alternative solutions.

The ODA is a great server solution for mid-size companies but be aware of the limitations when it comes to real application cluster.

Also, make sure the solution provides enough disk storage for the life time of the product.