Oracle Exadata Reviews

Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement.

One of the things that we are facing during these few months is how you manage the people environment, and it's something that we have to explore to understand what is happening inside these machines. 

We are facing some problems with authentication. I believe that we are not familiar with the Oracle virtual machines. That's why we need to improve ourselves to better understand what is going on inside this environment. 

The integration with third-party applications regarding access management security could be better. I would like that to be included and be available the first time. Most of them, we need to buy later, and we would like to have these components when we're actually testing if this component.

This is one thing that we are facing here in our environment. The integration becomes very difficult, and most of these features are not available the first time when you finalize the integrations.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for about six months. 

Oracle Exadata is a stable solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle technical support a seven. The involvement of Oracle's people is something that they have to improve because they are operating in very poor countries. We need to clarify with them because the technical people's availability must be well organized for the job to go smoothly. 

Another thing is the language. We speak Portuguese, and the technical people don't speak another language. It starts to get very difficult to work like this. We are not English, and they are not English, and it becomes very difficult to communicate. 

They are the ones with the solution, so they are brilliant at working with Oracle. We can solve all the issues. They have time to share their experience with us. That's one thing that I stated to those guys working on this implementation.

The initial setup was straightforward. But this particular situation is different because we are not talking about putting it on and going into production. We have to move the initial systems to these environments. 

We need to convert some systems to be compatible with those environments. The main challenge is the IT infrastructure. It is not like we buy it, open it, create and edit it. We need to move, and that is the challenge. Right now, we are in the middle of finalizing this movement with migration from legacy to the new environment.

From a technical point of view, it didn't take long because it's straightforward. We started and went step by step until the end or until the machine was available for migration. It was very simple.

We worked with a technical team from Oracle, and our partners supported us and helped us do that. But most of the time, it was between my team and Oracle.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle Exadata ten.

We sell hyper-converged infrastructure tools including Oracle Exadata to enterprise customers such as governments. These are large projects that handle big data and typically run into the range of several million dollars, and in 2016, we had our first big Exadata project which involved implementing two superclusters with Exadata and Exalogic together. 

In some processes, we use converged infrastructure tools, but it's far more common nowadays to go with hyper-converged infrastructure tools. On our side, we prefer hyper-converged infrastructure because there just aren't that many people using the standard convergence model anymore. We're changing our processes to work exclusively with hyper-convergence and other technologies that complement hyper-convergence.

We use Exadata and Exadata Cloud at customer sites, and the main project that we're involved in now is hyper-converged Oracle environments with Exadata. I'm studying how to best apply the hyper-convergence model in Oracle to change Exadata to VxRail. But my forecast going forward is that we will be using fifty percent hyper-converged tools with Dell VxRail, and fifty percent with Oracle Exadata.

With Oracle Exadata, the change from on-premise to cloud is becoming a reality. With this, it becomes better and easier for us to make renovations and maintain our projects. We earn money with renovations on cloud, but when it comes to on-prem, we don't earn much when the customer needs renovations and support.

Regarding features, there are so many that we can offer to customers. When we sell Exadata Cloud, there are many options to choose from, especially when it comes to enterprise database options. In my experience, the main features that are appreciated are various ones like GPS and the assortment of security options.

There is one aspect to Exadata that I dislike, and that's the inconsistency with other databases. When you try to get Exadata to function with another type of database like SQL, or others, there should be reliable and consistent operation. When this is improved on, we should start to see more applications growing the market.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for six years, more or less.

Stability is very good. Especially if you maintain it and always update, you won't have any problems with stability. Once Exadata is established, it's 100%.

My one customer was using the Exadata version from 2013 which was extremely outdated, and when they changed to the updated version of the main system application it was very healthy for the customer's company. 

I think the scalability is good, but it can be even better. With the newer editions of Exadata, they are changing some features to meet the needs of growth and scalability, like access to additional disks in the storage environment, and they've upped the memory, too. But I don't think it was central, or essential, to the Exadata offering at first.

Nowadays, it's easier. In the first years of implementation of Exadata it was a bit more difficult, but now it's easier. If you have a team that knows Exadata well, and knows the limits of Exadata, then the setup and implementation is easy. If, on the other hand, you don't have an experienced team, then it's really difficult.

The last implementation we deployed took about two weeks, more or less.

The majority of our customers are in government or big enterprises, and the projects that we sell come out to several million USD. With this amount of money on the table, it's always better to have an experienced team of consultants, who know Exadata very well, handle the implementation.

If you're interested in going with Exadata, then I highly recommend looking for an experienced consulting firm that has completed at least one large implementation before, because it isn't something you want to put in the hands of unskilled consultants. And don't forget to be careful with your implementation when it comes to GDPR in Europe.

I would rate Oracle Exadata a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for financial data purposes which runs at our warehouse.

We have had the benefit from the reduction of almost one terabyte of data from using the querying function.

The feature that allows querying the storage server is great. The solution can handle heavy workloads, always has updated features, fast response times, and many tasks are automated. Furthermore, if you want to do the consultation, instead of maintaining the multiple test systems, or multiple on-premises services, you can use virtualization and you can use it.

A few improvements can be made such as better resource optimization, virtualization where you can see the virtual machine on top of the Exadata, the ability to limit CPUs, and reduced license costs. 

We need a monitoring tool which can in one place, where we can manage, monitor the entire Exadata components. Currently, we have multiple tools for different components to check and verify but one would be a benefit.

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

If needed you can scale it up. In terms of CPU and memory, we increased the memory and CPUs to accomplish this. You are limited from the hardware you have, increasing the performance of your hardware allows for increased scalability.

There are times when there are complicated problems and we have reached our limits and cannot solve them. This is when we have contacted the support. When this has happened, their team has been good at resolving our problems. Whenever we had these issues we worked with them and they were able to have an answer within a 12 to 24-hour time frame.

The setup was not too complicated. We followed the standards install and we didn't see any big issues. We did try a few different versions and some of the migration can be a little bit labouring but we didn't face any data challenges.

The licensing can be a bit expensive because you need to have certain tools enabled that require them.

Oracle is known to be the number one in their industry; the help and support, the features they are giving the clients comparing to other databases, the new technology, the provide a good solution. They are number one, in my opinion, I strongly recommend the product.

No product is ever perfect, there is always room for improvement and because of this I rate Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.

We used to work on business intelligence projects, so we really enjoyed the service-like performance.  It's been great.

The business intelligence is very good.

We have found that the analytics environment is excellent.

We've discovered that the solution is quite a complex product, which can make it difficult to sell. Snowflake, for example, is simpler and therefore an easy sell.

The customization can sometimes be difficult to achieve.

We've been working with the solution for a very long time. It's been more than 15 years personally and at least 15 years at this company, so it's been well over a decade at this point.

We don't deal with bugs or glitches and the product doesn't crash or freeze. The only real issues we come across are related to customization. It's quite stable. We haven't had problems.

We have about 100 people using the product currently.

Our clients are quite sizeable companies.

I've never used technical support and therefore can't really comment on their responsiveness or level of knowledge. I have an internal team that assists with troubleshooting as necessary.

As a consultancy, we work with a variety of products. This includes Oracle and Snowflake, for example.

We are an integrator of the solution. Our clients are sizeable companies, and there are several providers involved in different projects with Exadata. We're not the only administrators. 

I personally haven't handled an installation. We're mostly focused on projects related to BI and analytics. Someone else handles the setup and we just use the product or have our clients use it. I don't have a sense of whether the implementation is difficult or complex or how long deployments take.

We are a consultancy. We are partners with Oracle, with Snowflake, and with other vendors, software vendors.

We work in different deployment models with our customers. We try to fit our customers' needs. It depends on the customer and the project in terms of which deployment model we'll recommend or use.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It's very good. We've had a great experience using it over the years.

We have two primary use cases for Exadata. The first is for a financial services company, which is an online bank. We use this product for all of their transaction processing. In their locale, they have a lot of transactions related to the automotive industry.

The most valuable feature is the time to solution. 

The standard deviation that comes with it is helpful.

We appreciate the operational standards, which includes patching at least two times per year. This keeps it secure and up to date.

There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements. In my experience, rather than being handled by flash memory, it is being done using the hard drive. This slows it down a lot in certain cases. The reason this happens is that Temp IO often has a lower priority when compared to transactional operations such as Write Vault, Redo Vault, and Commit. This means that it can never get enough "attention" to be placed in flash memory.

The entry-level pricing is too high for the smaller shops.

Some additional built-in automation would be helpful. Some automation already exists in the software deployment process, but different components are handled differently, so more automation would be an improvement.

We have been using Oracle Exadata for about nine years, since 2011.

Stability-wise, I would rate this product close to ten out of ten.

Oracle Exadata is very scalable.

When one of our customers such as a bank employs one or more Exadata machines to handle database work, it means that the whole bank could be using it.

The technical support from Oracle is pretty good. It could be better at times but for the most part, they are knowledgeable.

The initial setup always comes with some complexity because it needs a lot from the customer to prepare the site, network, firewalls, and the rest. The deployment is always complex.

Preparing for deployment can take a couple of months, again depending on the requirements. There are standard things that have to take place, such as allocating space in the data center and making sure that the power, cabling, and switches are there. Once everything is in place, the software installation will take two or three days.

My team handles the deployment for our customers.

The licensing is the same as it is with other Oracle products, which depends on how many CPU cores are activated. In addition to that, there are storage licenses that are needed. All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle.

This is a product that I can recommend, although there needs to be a clear understanding of the use cases because Exadata doesn't come cheap. There is the requisition cost, the cost of support, costs for maintenance, and none of that is cheap. As long as there is a solid reason why Exadata is needed in the organization, I would definitely recommend it.

My suggestion for anybody who is implementing this solution is geared towards the in-house DBAs as opposed to customers in general. DBAs tend to handle Exadata the way they would any Oracle database, which is not the way to do it. Many of them have been working with Oracle databases for their entire career, and often, training on Exadata is necessary to get it working properly.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I was running an ERP system on Rackmount machines with critical databases on it. There is no way to scale-in and very expensive to scale-out as the system is growing countrywide. Replication between sites and branches not guaranteed. Also, the EOL of this infrastructure drives this huge change, and to avoid huge change management on the application point of view and the need to maintain the same database technology it was the biggest challenge that I ever faced during this times, moving from Version 9 to 11g and now to 19c.

It has improved the performance, now we run with more performance cores with less CPU to attend all the database demands. Reducing Time to Market, increase our ability to face the competition with speed and low cost. We improved the database availability while ensuring business continuity implementing efficient replication between main and DR site, so we decreased from one downtime in two months to zero downtime a year. So we can sleep as we are confident that data replication is running without any constraints. Multi-tenancy is one feature that can be used to guarantee the investment on this infra.

Business Continuity is the most valuable feature. The replication between the site via Data Guard is performing without any constraints, the agility to make tests of switchover, and back following disaster recovery procedure. The performance using this machine to providing database service is as easy as next to next database administrations. We can run AWR data collection for performance evaluation and problem-solving without any production performance constraints. Using Database partitioning and Cache Memory in each storage cell boost all we need as a database machine. The easy administration gives us time for training, improve our business understanding, and care about our competitors. Also, the container Database (CDB/PDB) together with other technologies (like Micro Services) can very improve the company core business.

The Oracle Support. I believe Oracle must improve its procedure to support the clients. The customer Ready Service must provide more use cases and benchmarks of their infrastructure to support client design decisions. Oracle must audit their partners regularly to guarantee they provide quality service even after been passed on partnership examination. Increase the FDP in the Southern Africa region can boost quality and competition on support service also increase product selling on these countries.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for bout nine years.

This machine are equipped with new edge of fault tolerance technologies ensuring business continuity. All servers have dual power supply and the hard drives are reliable. Following the Oracle procedure to assembly this hardware in your datacenter with clean power is one thing that guarantees the stability. Of course, a support contract must be signed off between client and oracle to predict all possible disruption on time.

There are many models of this engineering system, starting from X2 in 2011 to the last version X8M, you can choose a quarter, half and full, depending on your workload and budget. Starting with the quarter size you can scale it by adding more servers and storage until Full version or adding another box.

Every implementation is unique. I have been working with Oracle since 2005 and have not had issues regarding technical support. But Oracle must audit their implementation partners regularly to avoid major problems like a bad quality implementation that make clients raise a call.

The initial setup is not so complex as it is done by Oracle Experts and is validated by the senior engineers.

We implemented it through the vendor team. I worked with a very skilled personal, like project managers, ACS Support Leaders and technicians that have very experience in deploying this kind of systems

Using this infrastructure for a database as a service or Oracle Cloud at Customer/Service can be a good approx. to increase your ROI.

Going to EXADATA is not good advice for non-profit companies, like government institutions, all though this is a very safe infrastructure to guarantee security and availability for a long period. The OPEX must be well prepared for a period that can have all the return of the investment. Using EXADATA as a database as a Service (Multi-tenancy) can be an alternative to good ROI.

We also evaluated Postgress.

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.

My primary job on Exadata is working with the Oracle engineer whenever a customer makes a patching request. We engage with the Oracle engineer regarding Exadata patching in a quarterly manner, around every three months. I collaborate and communicate with our customers daily regarding these activities on Exadata.

On our customer side, we deploy Exadata X7 and Exadata X5. We work on our customer's side with Exadata patching on Exa 5 and Exa 7, and with an Oracle Enterprise Manager regarding monitoring purposes.

Their monitoring tool is available in the Exadata environment where you can easily monitor all things in the Exa tech support and if there is any issue present in Exa, you can easily fix it.

We are willing to migrate our customers to Exadata X8 since this is a new version of Oracle Exadata.

Their Smart Scan is a very capable feature with a great data retrieval rate.

It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for one and a half years.

Exadata is also a very stable environment. Their Smart Scan feature is great for every banking environment and financial institutions willing to implement it. 

It is a very scalable environment.

Our customers are very satisfied regarding Exadata because when we raise a call with Oracle regarding any issue their response is very prompt, within 5 minutes. And an engineer is available for working on the issue.

The initial setup was very easy and took two to four hours working on it because this is an engineer system. So the Oracle engineer and the ACS team worked on it and on the on-premises database to migrate to Oracle Exadata.

In our current situation it is not bad, it's a very capable and very comprehensive solution.

On a scale of one to ten I rate Exadata a ten!

All business Oracle databases were spread across many DB servers and different platforms. We consolidated all of our databases onto a single Exadata box to ensure that they were running on the same platform and have greater coordination and integration between the databases. Also, we gained performance without much change in the database code, as well as saved a greater amount of space by applying the compression feature. 

We experienced a significant performance improvement without changing the code, simply utilizing Oracle Exadata standard smart features including Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, and Storage Indexes.

We saved a great amount of storage by applying different levels of HCC and removing ninety percent of the indexes. This is a powerful and extremely stable system with IB network speed.

Most of the Exadata features are enabled by default, without the need for configuration. For example, the smart features include Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Storage Indexes, and IB 40GB. 

Compression is a great feature, where one can really save a lot of storage.

Oracle has introduced Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and autonomous features for automatic database tuning. The new addition of X8M has come with a direct memory read future to deliver amazing performance for all sorts of OLTP and analytics workloads. This should benefit the Exa community.

General perception from many customers is the cost and maintenance of exadata database machine. Although Oracle recently introduced low cost storage and automated many features, still the cost and maintenance is a concern. Oracle should provide free of cost the Exadata software on the box to have more customers.

We have been using this solution for more than eight years.

Every component in the Oracle Exadata database is redundant. Hence, it provides HA for every layer.

This solution offers the flexibility to add more servers, storage servers, or a combination of both.

Oracle support service needs more improvement.

We haven't used Engineered Systems for Oracle database platforms, though, we were on various platforms that were difficult to manage and maintain.

The bare metal setup is done by Oracle professionals and managed by them. Though, customers can manage this on their own, depending on the skill set of their team.

Our implementation was done on-site, through the vendor.

We realize ROI through higher throughput, high availability, and business continuity.

Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution.

We compared other market players of Engineered systems. However, Oracle Exadata features are unmatched by other players in the market.

Oracle is coming out with many advanced hardware additions and software solutions to make this product the world's best database machine.