Oracle Exadata Reviews

Basically, we simply use the solution to store our own database. We run more than 135 applications in our bank and we use Oracle to hold the data.

The solution is extremely stable. That's one of the main reasons we are using it.

The product is flexible.

It's a fairly easy-to-use solution.

The solution scales quite well and always meets our needs when we need to extend it.

The product is very easy to install.

Technical support is quite good.

The solution could always be more stable and more reliable. The more they work on this, the better the product will be. That said, for the most part, right now, it's pretty good.

I've been using the solution for two years. It hasn't been that long just yet.

The stability has been very good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance has been great.

The solution offers excellent scalability. It's one of its great selling features. We never have to worry about it not having enough capacity for our needs.

Currently, we have about 8,000 end-users on this product.

Currently, we're quite happy with Oracle's technical support, If we weren't we would definitely let them know. However, at this time, they are helpful and responsive.

The initial implementation is quite simple and straightforward. It's not difficult or too complex for someone to handle. A company should have no trouble with the setup process. 

For us, the deployment process took around three days. That was just to have all of the planning and other stuff in line and ready to go. Everything all together - including the migration, et cetera, should be three to five days, or something in that ballpark.

We have about 35 people in IT that can handle any maintenance tasks required.

For the initial setup, we do have an integrator. There are three parties involved with the implementation process. There's Oracle, then the distributor, and finally, the party that was contracted for implementation.

We are under contract and pay a license to Oracle. I cannot speak to the exact amount.

We've mostly been using Oracle for our systems, however, we do use MySQL for our verification. 

We're customers and end-users of Oracle.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number, however. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've mostly been quite happy with its overall capabilities. I'd recommend the product to other users and companies.

We are a telecommunications company. The information that we have there, it's Oracle Suite including a CRM, help service integration, and more. That's the core of the system. All the information is available to users using Oracle BI, and some other tools. We're very Oracle-based in our product choice.

In the past, all the reports that the organization needed would have to pass through a new requirement. And in order to create it, a person needed IT, and the developers. They would have to then test it and release it. Now, since we have this information available, access depends on the role, and the security filters and the user can access information and can make their own dashboards and reports and take decisions. They no longer need to go through IT and developers.

We're working on making our usage to be part of a service in a manner that the client can use the information and create their own dashboards, and reports. The client can access the information they need based on the role they have. It prevents them from being dependant on an IT department for access.

The data replication is very good.

The solution offers a good data warehouse.

The solution allows us to avoid conflict with the transactional databases. 

The replication of the database needs to avoid collision with the transactional databases. That's a very, very important aspect that needs to be looked at. 

It would be nice if we had access via mobile devices. To be able to have this information and the dashboards on cellphones or tablets or something like that would be great. It would make the solution similar to Tableau, for example, and other kinds of solutions. 

The initial setup process is very difficult and extremely complex.

I've used the solution since about 2017. It's been a few years at this point.

It's a pretty good solution, however, there may be more opportunity for more stability within the product. That said, the hardware and the database are some of the best Oracle has. It's pretty stable.

The on-premises versions of the solution are very difficult to work with, however, the next-generation cloud-based options are likely easier to expand as necessary.

We have about 800 concurrent users on the solution at any given time. It's a mid-sized company.

I'm not sure if we have plans to expand out own usage. It's a difficult time in Mexico, politically and also with COVID. We had plans to change some things last year, and they have since been pushed out. We're looking at different aspects of our entire system and we're reconsidering how it operates and if we should add partners or not.

While we used Oracle consultants for the implementation of the product, and that did not go very well at all, now that it is set up, I can say that we do find their general technical support quite good. We're on good terms with support in general, which comes from America, and I would say we are satisfied with the level of service Oracle provides.

We used a different solution a long, long time ago. It may have been something like InfoWorks. However, as I said, it was quite some time in the past.

The initial setup is not straightforward at all. It's very complex and extremely difficult.

It's not easy to explain the entire process overall as there's a lot of criteria. We start working on the requirements, and the first implementation was not exactly what we spec'd it for. We had to start over, and we were complimenting these requirements. However, the functionality and scope ended up not being agreed upon by two partners. The users also did not take into account that they needed to be a part of the process. There were just so many moving parts that never lined up properly.

We've realized that a good solution must also be easy to use as the users will end up being the ones accessing the information, and, if they are confused, they'll never use the technology. On top of that, the requirements and scope need to be clear upfront.

I'm not sure how much staff has been needed for deployment and maintenance.

We used Oracle consultants and our experience with them was very, very bad.

I don't handle the licensing or billing, therefore, I'm not familiar with the direct costs of using this solution.

We did look at SAP before ultimately choosing Oracle. We may have looked at others, however, it was a long time ago. I'm not even sure if the same companies exist.

Ultimately, we chose Oracle as it was more suited for telecommunications whereas SAP was more into manufacturing.

We don't have a business relationship with the company. We are just users.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using.

While telecommunications is an area that always does pretty well - as people need internet and other related services, even in these strange times, it's a strange time in Mexico for a variety of reasons and therefore we are rethinking how we are approaching entire systems and maybe holding off on some decisions until the landscape clears a bit.

While I like Oracle as a solution, and its hardware and database are quite good, when we're talking about implementation, scalability, and integration, I would not recommend this solution. The best option today for a telecom company is likely Salesforce Vlocity.

I would rate the solution six out of ten.

As we are a service provider for the government our job is to stabilize the database layer. We need to make sure all our data is secure. That's why we like to work with a robust environment like Exadata to make sure that our response time and our reliability are good.

Oracle Exadata's performance is one of its best features. We very satisfied with it. The previous equipment used to make a payment for all the government employees used to take at least two days for some of the transactions. Now, it will take hours to make the same amount of payments. Another thing is the flexibility to organize all of our databases. We can use it with new features that come with this version of Oracle 19c, which is the container database. With container databases, we can work with many databases, organized and segregated, and still access the functions and management, the things that most of the technical people like to have in place.

Regarding the technical side of the machine itself, I don't see much that needs improvement. In terms of the kind of service and support that most of the clients need, it is huge investments. I would like to emphasize that the clients that use these technologies from Oracle must be well supported by the Oracle company. This is one thing that I would like to address. They could have better support.

Additionally, the price for the Exadata is quite high. This is one thing that Oracle must think about. You can find the same features and the same performance that Oracle provides in other kinds of technology. So it depends on the client. If you want to use an Oracle engineered system, then you know that you have to pay.

Otherwise, you'll need to buy more for performance, replications, and the availability of these kinds of things. But you don't want to pay a lot. You have another option that Oracle support calls Oracle ODA. With ODA, you don't have to use machines, but you have the same kind of features and key performances. However, you may have reduced options for scalability with these kinds of Oracle solutions compared to the engineering system like Exadata. After buying these, you have the support that you need to maintain all these environments. This is what I want to address.

I will mention security. I know that there is a feature for security, but it is not included in the first purchase of this solution. That means if you need to increase the security, you need to buy the security feature which doesn't come by default on these solutions. As you may know, there are a lot of security problems all over the world with this kind of environment. Based on the fact that we are serving the government, we need to have security issues solved from the beginning and take care of security immediately. It would be better if Oracle could have some solutions that would bring us the confidence with their security at the outset. That's one thing I would like to address.

I'm not saying that there is no security on this machine. There is good security on the version of Oracle which is running on these machines, it's very nice. But I'm saying this because I know that Oracle can do more than that and bring the substation to the clients.

I have been using Oracle Exadata since 2010.

Even with the old machines, we didn't have any constraints with the stability. There were some problems regarding the hardware that you must change because they are getting holes and they fail more frequently. When the life cycle goes, it's the end. But on the other side, this machine is very stable.

Since we have had these machines in production, we haven't had any downtime. Over the last two years, we had a lot of downtime with the old machines because they were very old and did not have enough performance to solve the demands of the database. But we don't have any constraints about the stability with these new machines.

The strategy of the company was not to pay a lot, because we don't have much money. So we began with the scalability approach. We bought enough resources to sustain the demands of all our clients.

If the demands increase, we can also increase the resources and close off the cabinets. We can scale this machine anytime that we need. We can go until the version that they allowed for scalability. Then, if you need to maintain this technology, you can scale out and have two machines working together side by side.

This is a database machine. We have a system that hosts more than 20,000 citizens. So most of the time we have more than 3,000 transactions per day. As a service company for the government, every database resource is on this machine. We have at least three or four databases running on this machine and we have many applications that are running through this machine as well, so it serves all the countries.

The first line of maintenance is done by my team, including day to day operation. Support from Oracle is for things which are beyond our knowledge of database administration. Most of the time, the maintenance is done by us. But there is a point you must understand regarding the hardware maintenance. We are not allowed to do hardware maintenance, this belongs exclusively to the Oracle Team. The Oracle Team must be the one that does the hardware maintenance on these machines. Of course, we have a partner here in Mozambique who represents Oracle. This company is the one that is the second line of support. If they find something, they can escalate it to Oracle or they can solve it themselves.

When we started the company, we thought about the responsibilities that the company would have attending to all the requests from the government and that we would need to go to robot technology. We thought in 2002 to go directly to work with the Oracle database. So Oracle database was the first database technology we decided to use as our strategic plan for the stability of the company.

At that time, we start working with the small machines and after two or three years, we realized that there are a lot of scalability problems with those kinds of machines and stability issues with this kind of hardware. So that's why we we had lots of downtime and we spent lots of time correcting these kinds of problems instead of thinking about growing the business. So we moved these small machines to a bigger one in 2010. That's all extra data with the X-2 version, but these kinds of machines are getting old and they are out of order now. We cannot buy the spare parts or anything else we need. So we decided to keep using all of the technology, but moved from that environment to a new machine with a better performance.

This has seen better performance. That's why we are still working with only one technology, Oracle.

For Oracle Exadata, there are two main profiles that you have to take care of. One is the installation itself, like assembling the machines, which need some kind of expertise. The other is the installation of the software and creating the database, which need other kinds of equipment. From our perspective, our main goal within all of this is not about these two profiles. It's about the database engineering. Because we are coming from using an old machine, which is running an old version of Oracle, you will need to properly create not only the environment to host the database, you will also need to migrate from an old version of Oracle, like 11g, to 19c. This is another challenge that we have during implementation of these projects.

I can say that from acquisition it took at least, but not more than, five months to implement.

At acquisition we need to design the tenders and the rules of the company. The tender goes out, then it is published, then we evaluate all the tenders, then someone must win the tender. All this takes a lot of times. Then you go to the implementation phase. We did a workshop to design the solution. It took at least three weeks. Then it starts implementing the infrastructure. Migrating the database is another point because one database can take at least two days. That's the situation. But start to finish takes five months.

We did the assembling and installing of all these with the support of Oracle ACS, which is a very nice team that gives personal support for us. It was very good working with them. The other thing is the migrating itself. Migrating depends on each company because not all the companies have the same database architecture or the same data. That's why at the migration stage, 60% of the intervention of migrating from the old version of Oracle to the new version was done by my team. But the Oracle STS support was with us the whole time.

I would of course recommend Oracle Exadata to other people who are looking into implementing such solutions. They need to know what happens with this solution, what can be done with it, because as the government we cannot give out that information because it's not allowed. But, I would recommend it if a company wants to use these solutions, wants to have stability with their equipment, with their applications, and with their systems. If a company wants to be competitive in the market and have a good name, reputation and everything else, I think using Oracle, with the Oracle Exadata machine, is the best way to achieve that.

On a scale of one to ten, I can give Oracle Exadata a 9.

The primary use case is for maintaining contextual databases. In other words, it is for our online applications and services.  

The most valuable part of the product is performance enhancement.  

We still have to migrate to the latest version of Exadata, which we plan to do later this year or in the next year. Because of that, I am not sure we have anything that we would need to have added. I would need to consult our DBAs after we have migrated. They might find some issue that they would like addressed. But off the top of my head and because we are not on the newest version, it is not right to say the product needs something when it might already be there or has been updated.  

Exadata is practically a perfect solution for us as it stands. Because we are pretty satisfied with it, we have not rushed into the upgrade. I am not sure that we are fully utilizing the options that are currently on the table. For our contextual databases, it is the best option and we do not have any really an issue with it that needs improvement.  

We also need the product for other purposes. For analytics, we use Identity Two and we also need Microsoft Escrow Server for certain tasks. We accept some minor issues that I could identify if I discuss that with our DBAs. I do not think anything bothers us that much that we would need improvements. Of course, the price is the price, so it could always be less expensive. Maybe there are other considerations from the marketing side, but I do not deal with that.  

There are some issues with accounting where we really can not calculate return-on-investment. Exadata pays some fees for you so there is simplified billing, but that separates us from some evaluation of usage. Maybe Oracle could offer a solution for resolving that. Maybe a calculator or separate report that could help customers to find this data somehow. More clarity on this usage might affect how you estimate the workload of the storage and could really make clear what you get in return on using the product for the month.  

We migrated from Identity two on to Exadata sometime between five and six years ago.  

It is stable like other Oracle products.  

It is scalable. 

We developed some software for migration. The previous database was on the mainframe server and it was quite a nice product. We have a lot of experience, both with Oracle Exadata, with other databases, and other systems that we also use. We work with many solutions and we use what we think is best for a particular task. Contextual databases work especially well with Exadata.   

It is not really clear how to calculate the ROI for Exadata. Because you need to do the calculations for yourself, you need to know the license modeling pretty well. Even then, it is not very clear how much it costs for Exadata performance, CPU, and other additions. You really can not calculate these points when Exadata pays for you. Oracle could help customers to find out the actual numbers and help with calculations for ROI.  

If you compare an Oracle database on your system to buying into Exadata, which is an engineering system consisting of hardware, then, of course, it is more expensive. On the other hand, it gives you some possibilities to experience better performance than you would have if you would run Oracle on your servers. When you scale it up, it means that you actually get this additional hardware for free. You need to pay more for the license instead. This is one of the cost differences that is not very clear how to calculate. It is hard to tell how long it takes for one product or the other to become a cost advantage.  

There are some extra costs for hardware and for everything else if you upgrade to have better performance. At that point, the system uses not just the standard license, but also the storage shares. This can be quite significant when doing larger implementations. So the clarity of the cost models is something that could probably use some improvement from the Oracle side.  

It is quite difficult really to compare and evaluate all the solutions available. The market is pretty mature. We have to just make a shortlist of possible solutions from whatever products and solutions we are looking at and go from there. It is not realistic to do an in-depth analysis of everything.  

A lot of solutions that are more oriented toward network monitoring are now rebranded. The markets itself was previously called anomaly detection systems. Sometimes it is not quite clear which of the solutions really have additional capabilities that can make a difference without really studying them in-depth. We obviously looked at some extra products to contemplate and compare, and we continue to. But, for now, what we see and what we decided is where we will be staying. I am not sure that any product really offers a significant upgrade that is worth migrating for.  

Darktrace is a step ahead in some ways but, in this area, it is really difficult to assess clearly because there is a lot of the marketing fog. It is sometimes quite difficult to get to the facts about the advantages. It also may not be worth migrating when the product you are using will develop the same or similar capabilities.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Oracle Exadata highly. If you compare it to other engineering databases, I would rate it a nine.  

Practically perfect from my point-of-view.  

We are using Oracle Exadata as a warehouse for historical reporting to provide the historical data that can be utilized by Power BI for reporting.

This solution meets all of my expectations.

The performance of the data is the most important part. It's quite good, and the security features are also quite good.

The management monitoring tools are quite important and an area that needs some improvement. The monitoring or consoles that are available should be available across the platform, and not only seen when logging onto the server.

The availability of the monitoring should be responsive and available all of the time.

I am planning to switch from Oracle Exadata to one of Microsoft's solutions, such as Synapse Analytics, to improve the performance. 

We have our Power BI and other parts in the cloud. 

The Exadata, being on-premises, creates problems at times because of the gateway.

I recommend that Oracle come up with connectors that can be utilized by Oracle Exadata to convert the data that we have in Oracle to MySQL. We can extend the reach of Exadata to other toolsets.

I have been working with Oracle Exadata for three years.

It's stable and I have not experienced any issues.

This solution is scalable.

I have been working with Oracle support for the last 15 years. I have no issues with support.

The initial setup was done by my infrastructure team and I don't think that they found any difficulty in it. They are knowledgeable in Oracle, so they didn't have any problems.

We are okay with the licensing, as it's not much. Oracle is always costly but it's fine.

The ecosystem that we have in our company is majorly Microsoft-based. When I refer to power BI or other integrated tools, they are by Microsoft.

I would certainly recommend using Oracle. They have their cloud applications and I would say that it is not a good idea to go with an on-premises deployment. My suggestion is that people go with OCI instead.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Primarily OLTP but report is done against a combination of Materialized Views and transactional tables.

We have a number of statistics collected before cutover on our legacy environment compared to Exadata. Without doing anything other than copying the data across, we saw significant performance gains for most key processes. We receive feedback from users stating how fast the performance is compared to other systems. Performance issues are few and far between. Our database environment is extremely stable compared to the legacy DB configuration. We upgraded from a X2-2 quarter rack to a X5-2 eighth rack and experienced significant performance gains. We recently performed another technology refresh to a X7-2 so obviously, we've been very pleased with the initial investment. For this deployment, we decided to virtualize the Exadata configuration, providing some additional flexibility to our operational environment.

We primarily run OLTP with some reporting. With that being said, the feature that provides us the most performance gains is the Smart Flash Cache for the OLTP databases. The "offloading" capabilities provide the biggest performance gains for Reporting such as smart scans and storage indexes. There is a new security feature which allows disabling ssh to the storage servers which will make my security folks very happy. Also, there is a STIG script for hardening storage servers and Database Nodes which can be implemented as a report only or actually implement security settings. Would advise running report first to assess the results and then manually modify, as needed.

My biggest gripe has been patches which has dramatically improved since our initial Exadata was delivered (January 2011). The only issues we periodically experience are with non-default RPMs on the database nodes. These may fail during the pre-req check which means opening a SR with support. This has become the exception, not the norm so overall not much to complain about. The X2-2 used to experience frequent disk failures but now, that is a thing of the past. 

eleven years

There is redundancy built throughout the Exadata so even when we've experienced a disk failure, it's a very low stress situation. Early on we had some performance issues with DBFS and a node eviction problem. DBFS was resolved through a combination of settings changes and a quarterly patch. The node eviction was resolved through a one-off patch that eventually got rolled into a quarterly patch. I would chalk up these issues to being early adopters. We do have an occasional bug but I can't think of any that would be unique to Exadata with the database software. At least this provides some degree of comfort that Exadata is not the source of the issue.

The key for scalability is selecting the appropriate disk configuration and the proper size rack configuration. The two options are High Capacity and High Performance. If ever in doubt, always go with High Capacity. The performance difference is negligible at best, however having the extra space allows for more consolidation. That's the entire point of Exadata, to consolidate databases. We've added a few databases to the Exadata since we originally started to use the environment and there has been no performance impact. In our case, a Quarter rack was appropriate but for larger environments, this may not be enough.

Customer Service:

In terms of overall Oracle customer service, we've had good experiences on this front. Oracle has provided us access to their experts and continually check to see how things are going. Whenever an issue comes up, they treat the problem seriously. Since we support a government customer, Oracle is extra motivated to ensuring we have a successful experience. Since 2011, there have been significant improvements with support. Occasionally we do hit issues which it seemingly takes support a longer period of time to provide a patch or workaround but these namely involve additional features, not core technology so it's a matter of exhibiting patience.

Technical Support:

On the hardware side, customer service is quite good. Any disk failures get replaced in a day and with triple redundancy for disk, it's not been a concern. Software customer service has improved over the years. Early on was a little rough as I will say the software wasn't fully mature. As the product has matured, so has the software support's capability to resolve issues more quickly. We can't take advantage of ASR, however this seems like a major improvement for customer service in terms of responsiveness.

We didn't switch, we were doing a technology refresh and went with Exadata instead of building out our own Oracle RAC configuration. We previously had a combination of Dell servers, Red Had Linux OS, Oracle Cluster File System on EMC Storage with Juniper switches. This configuration had lots of performance issues, node evictions, and constant headaches. Since moving to Exadata, all those pain points went away.

There is a definite learning curve initially. We had to learn about migration options, shared mount point options, how to integrate with Cloud Control, patching, health check, how to optimize, and how to harden the Exadata environment. Since we went live, many more folks use Exadata so there's more how to's and best practice documents available so the learning curve isn't nearly as steep. We learned a lot in the process and now have a tremendous amount of expertise in setting up, configuring, optimizing and maintaining the Exadata.

We implement Exadata in-house and have gone through several migration methodologies.

We had ACS perform the initial Startup Pack, however there are companies that can do this much cheaper to lower the original setup cost, such as ours. Day-to-day cost is greatly reduced compared to our legacy environment as we no longer have to serve as "fire fighters." In terms of pricing, Exadata is probably not going to be the lowest cost option. There is a price to pay for performance and stability. With that being said, I have not heard of any customers who have regretted the purchase and/or looking to get off the technology. On the contrary, I can't imagine going to another solution at this point and trying to justify this with the user community in terms of why the system performance degraded. Can't imagine that would go over too well.

We had a custom solution and evaluated Exadata versus the custom solution. Exadata was actually a cheaper solution due to the number of cores. Oracle software licenses are based on processor so if comparing a Quarter Rack versus a 4+ four node custom solution, Exadata may win out from this perspective. We were looking at a 5 node RAC which would have doubled the cost of our software licenses when compared to the equivalent with a Quarter rack of Exadata. Besides, the performance metrics indicated Exadata would easily outperform the custom solution which made our decision a no brainer.

Exadata is a powerful solution. As I mentioned there is a learning curve. Working with a company that has experience with Exadata can help avoid potential pain points and maximize the ROI.

We work on data warehouses and data marts.

The tool performs well with a large database. It is easy to integrate the tool with other ELT solutions. The performance and data transformation are excellent. We recommend it to our clients. The tool has good storage technologies.

The product must make more investments in object storage technologies. Six to seven years ago, the product had an SQL-based analytics feature that did not work well. The vendor must consider investing in it. The analytics features must be improved.

I have been using the solution for more than ten years.

Oracle Exadata is a robust product.

We must pay more money if we need more storage. I rate the product’s scalability a ten out of ten. The tool is suitable for enterprises and SMBs.

I rate the tool’s pricing a three out of ten. The solution is expensive.

Teradata is a competitor. If we use Teradata, we must use their data warehouse model.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I use Oracle Exadata in the context of banking. The system's ability to quickly access and process large amounts of data is crucial, especially when handling extensive datasets. This rapid data retrieval ensures minimal delays for end-users accessing the system.

It offers a significant advantage for accommodating a large number of users. To put it in perspective, a standard Oracle database may only support around four hundred to five hundred simultaneous users. However, when utilizing Exadata, this capacity can be dramatically increased to accommodate two thousand or even three thousand simultaneous end users, demonstrating its scalability and performance capabilities.

There's room for improvement in terms of deployment, as it could be made faster and more user-friendly. I also have reservations about the cost, it is significantly high.

I have been using it for several years.

It provides good stability capabilities.

It can effectively handle a large number of users, making it a robust and scalable solution.

Their customer support is really good. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is not complex and it can be installed in just a few hours.

The duration of deployment depends on a variety of factors, including the database size, the number of tables to be installed, and the configuration of storage spaces. The process can be time-consuming, and it's highly dependent on the specific requirements of the deployment. One or two engineers are typically sufficient to maintain Exadata.

It is quite expensive. Nevertheless, its numerous strengths and advantages make it a compelling choice.

If you opt for cloud-based solutions, it might not be a necessary choice for your business. However, in non-cloud environments, Exadata becomes valuable for handling a large user base efficiently, leading to faster performance. I woudl rate it eight out of ten.