Oracle Exadata Reviews

I deal most with Oracle database. I have been working with Oracle Database Appliance for more than 25 years, and if you're talking about appliance, it's more than 10 years, but on Oracle database, it's more than 25 years.

When discussing Oracle Exadata, the main thing is the specialized database appliance, the flash cache, and the engineered machine on the database for the database itself. Overall, all the features are useful and meaningful for any database like Oracle to run the Oracle database.

Regarding Smart Scan technology, it is for better performance. If a customer cannot tune their applications, this will help them to run the database and run the application without any tuning itself.

Oracle Exadata's advanced compression techniques have affected my customer's data storage efficiency positively, with the feature being great, but as of now, our customer is not using that. I find its security measures align with my customer's organization, as security is aligned as per the customer's requirement.

It has helped optimize performance and cost.

I believe that there is still room for improvement in Oracle Exadata, as they are putting AI features on those databases, which is making the database more user-friendly. Even you can talk to the database with natural language. Those are the features they are adding to the database. The autonomous database can run on engineered machines as well. They are improving and it's not that there is no room for improvement; they are adopting those new features on every new release of the product.

In terms of AI capabilities, there is still some room for improvement.

I have been working with Oracle Database Appliance for more than 25 years, and if you're talking about appliance, it's more than 10 years, but on Oracle database, it's more than 25 years.

Oracle Exadata's capability in handling large-scale data is good.

I think the technical support by Oracle has been good so far. They are good in terms of technical support for the databases. If I were to rate their support from one to ten, I would say between nine to ten.

Positive

I have been both partner and reseller, as we are actually an Oracle partner, OPN partner, and we are a system integrator and also reseller.

I find its pricing reasonable and cost-effective for large organizations, but for smaller organizations, it may not be that useful.

I would recommend ODA, Oracle Database Appliance, for smaller companies instead of Oracle Exadata.

I think that their licensing model is definitely user-friendly as long as you are running your Oracle database on the engineered machine, which is good so far. I gave this review an overall rating of ten.

I am working with a supercluster combining Exadata and ExadataLogic. We have Exadata and superclusters in our organization, and I have been working with both since 2017.

Exadata's main feature is indexing. It also offers high backend speed between self-storage units and servers, which is beneficial for processing. The compute power is in the memory. These features allow for efficient processing.

Also considered an advantage, the main drawback is the inability to cluster two Exadata systems across sites. For example, with one node on one site and another node on a different site, I cannot create an extended rack cluster. Other Oracle products with active-pass features are used instead. This limitation requires two Exadata systems at each site.

I have used the solution since 2017.

Maintenance is easy, aside from pricing. Once installed, Exadata is very stable. We have many Exadata and superclusters, with no hardware failures or issues.

Scalability is limited across sites. Within a site, scalability is excellent. For large databases, engineering systems are definitely required. 

Exadata comes with a platinum gateway and comprehensive support, which often gets immediate attention with severity one cases. This is one of the best aspects of the engineering systems. However, hardware failures can take time to resolve as it depends on coordination between Path Maps and Oracle.

Positive

From when we get the hardware, deployment includes various components like IV switches, management switches, cell storages, and servers. Each component requires specific updates, unlike standalone systems. Operating system and database updates, along with patching cell storages and management switches, are necessary. Despite this complexity, testing has shown very few issues.

The investment is good, which is why people choose this hardware. However, in some cases, one or two customers face issues and question their purchase choice, but this is common with all products. Even a Ferrari can have issues.

The new database in version twenty-three might have new features that I am not yet familiar with. The Exadata system still supports version nineteen c. People are not transitioning to the new version yet, and neither am I. I would rate the product at eight point five to nine out of ten.

With Oracle Exadata, users can run many different workloads. Oracle Exadata comes in multiple flavors including Oracle Exadata on the Cloud, Oracle Exadata on-premises, and ExaCS (the customer version of Oracle Exadata) where customers are responsible for a certain percentage of what they put into the system. There is also a SaaS version where everything is controlled by Oracle.

Users can run OLTP, data warehouse operations, and OLAP. The storage subsystem of Oracle Exadata has its own internal system that can be expanded. When more host horsepower is needed and the box reaches its capacity limit, similar to UCS with its blade servers, CPUs, and memory, users can daisy chain another box and connect them together, making two physical boxes appear as one logical machine.

Oracle Exadata is proclaimed as a highly engineered system, though it requires complex setup procedures. Initial deployment requires working with a dedicated Oracle team who builds the system according to specifications. After the initial rollout, documentation is provided that highlights permitted and restricted actions.

The system supports multiple deployment options including cloud, on-premises, and managed versions. It excels at running OLTP workloads, data warehousing, and OLAP operations. The storage subsystem can be expanded through daisy-chaining, allowing multiple physical boxes to function as a single logical machine.

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 performance views in Oracle Exadata are partially obsolete and inadequately documented. This presents a significant contrast to non-Oracle products, such as Cisco, which maintain comprehensive documentation.

A significant issue arose during an international project where Oracle sales certified system compatibility that proved incorrect during implementation. This created conflicts between client expectations and actual system capabilities, leaving the on-site Oracle representative to manage client dissatisfaction.

45 years

The initial setup with Oracle Exadata is complex and requires Oracle's direct involvement. Oracle performs the initial setup alongside the client but handles the actual configuration work. After system delivery and contract signing, they establish clear boundaries regarding responsibilities based on the contract terms and payment level. These terms vary between clients.

On a scale of one to 10, the rating for Oracle Exadata depends significantly on system management personnel. The hardware itself is reliable, warranting an eight or nine rating. However, issues can arise from improper management, as demonstrated during the Obamacare implementation when a patch was applied directly to production without proper testing, resulting in system failure.

The reviewer worked within Oracle's customer service department after clients purchased Oracle products, and in ACS (customer support). Their role included accompanying sales teams to conduct technical assessments of client environments and ecosystems. This involved creating blueprints for integrating Oracle products into client systems, followed by technical presentations to Oracle teams and stakeholders. After receiving approval from both Oracle and clients, they would proceed with project execution through detailed statements of work and project plans.

The initial setup with Oracle Exadata is complex and requires Oracle's direct involvement. Oracle performs the initial setup alongside the client but handles the actual configuration work. After system delivery and contract signing, they establish clear boundaries regarding responsibilities based on the contract terms and payment level. These terms vary between clients.

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, as Oracle maintains strict licensing cost policies with limited flexibility for negotiation.

The reviewer cautions potential buyers about system compatibility issues, stating that some purchased features may not work as expected. The overall rating given for Oracle Exadata is 8 out of 10.

We use Oracle Exadata for several enterprise databases that accommodate all-day operations on two Exadatas. I can't disclose the specific use of these databases, but they handle heavy connections and a large number of transactions. This environment is set up to process requests from a transaction system. We use the databases in a Standby Environment, Oracle Standby Environment, or Data Guard, with the primary databases on the first Exadata and standby databases on the second Exadata.

Support for unbreakable HA 24x7 operations. Never stop.

The most valuable features of Oracle Exadata are its high availability and cluster environment. We have two nodes per Exadata, and although the setup is a RAC One Node environment and not a full cluster, it effectively serves our needs for failover support.

We recently completed an extension of our storage space. There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and customization options. The price is also higher than I would prefer.

I have been working with Oracle Exadata on-premises since the end of 2021 with Oracle 19c, which amounts to nearly four and a half years. Previously I had been working with Exadata 6,7 with Oracle 11g. 

I have not encountered any negative experiences with the stability of Oracle Exadata.

We have a reseller partner who handles the update operations and maintenance of the Oracle Exadata software and environment. Overall, I find their support generally satisfactory.

Positive

Before using Oracle Exadata, we used Sun Spark Solaris, but we have since discontinued its use.

I was supported by a reseller partner for both implementation and updates.

The price is a major consideration. I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.

Price is a crucial factor, and I would rate Oracle Exadata a nine overall. I am satisfied with its functionalities and performance.

I am an enterprise architect, and I use the solution for transactional data in banking.

We have multiple transactions performed in multiple areas of banking. In India, we have UPI transactions, wallets, and virtual money, so there are several types of transactions going on. We can use a third party or a separate data warehouse such as Greenplum for the enterprise team. Oracle is easy to use for peripheral things, such as the data vault and the data firewall, data sync, and partitions. These are the features that give an edge to other databases. And when we sync between these databases from Exadata, it provides you with many features, such as compression ratios.

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.

I have been using the solution for approximately three years.

Exadata in a data warehouse is a nine out of ten regarding stability.

Oracle Exadata is good for transactional data within the limit of 50 terabytes. If your data is less than 50 terabytes, whether it is a small or large business, your data warehouse has to be around 35 terabytes, plus or minus, you can choose Oracle Exadata. Even with a full rack, and though Exadata X9 has come up, and you can keep increasing your storage, the reality is that memory, and other things are limited. If the solution's data is within 35 terabytes, and you want to tune and run analytics on transactional data, Exadata is a good solution. But you never hear of a company rejecting petabytes, so you have to think differently. It is for the warehouse I'm talking about, not the rate or big data, which are two different things.

Technical support from Oracle for Exadata is very good. We get vendor support, experts, and ACS also. You have to pay Oracle, but they have professional services. You will not get an Exadata expert into your home right into the market.

The initial setup depends upon the use cases, but the professional services from Oracle are very costly. If you have knowledgeable people within your organization who understand how things need to be built for an enterprise, then the initial setup becomes easier. If you don't have people and depend upon Oracle, they will sell you things you will never use in a thousand years. They will put everything into the system, saying they are required, but will never be used in a real vault.

If you have a smaller business and you're concerned about your IT spending, then you have a lot of other options, such as Vertica and Greenplum. All these are also good data warehouse solutions.

The Oracle database is trustworthy and is good for large customers who do not care about money.

Regulatory requirements are in place for the Oracle cloud, but it depends upon which country and which business line you are working in. If you are in manufacturing or the banking sectors, which do not allow your data outside your premises or country, you might not be able to use it.

I rate Exadata a seven out of ten. If you have the money, you can get it. If you don't, it's not that easy to get Exadata. The product is good for the big player, not for the middle and the lower player.

The major use of Exadata is for running databases, big databases, and also for backing them up. It provides high availability and high performance specifically for databases, and not for applications, just Oracle databases.

High availability and high performance are very valuable aspects of the solution. The key capability of Exadata, which is not found in any other solution or appliance, is its enhancement specifically for databases.

I would like to add some features to run applications or microservices-based applications on Exadata.

I have been using this solution for approximately two or three years.

Exadata is based on Linux OS, which is more secure and more stable than other operating systems like Windows. It requires specific skills but is more secure and stable.

In Exadata, there are spine switches used for scalability. These switches allow the integration of a full rack to another full rack, enabling scalability. With these features, we can make a multi-rack setup to act as one appliance. I rate its scalability as nine.

Some aspects need optimization, such as quicker response times. Some cases take a long time for Oracle to respond to, and sometimes the solutions provided are more like workarounds rather than direct fixes.

Neutral

The initial setup is challenging. It can depend on various factors, such as whether we are dealing with a quarter, half, full, or eighth rack, but generally, if it goes straight forward, it takes around five days to a week. If there are issues, it can take longer.

The pricing of Exadata is high. It is more expensive than usual, making it suitable only for big enterprises or businesses that can afford it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the solution for OLTP and data analytics. We have airline customers. We use the tool for our day-to-day operations.

It's an entire hardware box where the software and the hardware combination can fasten our queries for the database. The tool has an intelligent cell server where the data is processed at the storage layer rather than the server layer.

The tool supports our big data analytics and data warehousing needs. It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing. Oracle has the best database technology in the world. Exadata is the best hardware machine designed for huge database workloads along with OLTP.

Patching must be simplified. We have various levels of patching in the solution. Most of them are online, split into various components. A single way of patching would be better.

I have been using the solution for seven years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The product is very stable.

The product is very scalable. We have more than 1000 users in our organization.

We contact the support team regularly. Once we buy the tool, we get a CSI. We can raise service requests based on our CSI. We are happy with the support team.

When we purchased the solution, Oracle engineers visited us and did the full installation for us.

The solution is worth the money.

The solution’s cost is a little bit more than the traditional databases. Less cost would enable most customers to choose the product.

There is a hardware version and a software version. Our hardware version is X9, and the software version is 23. People who want to use the solution can negotiate the pricing with Oracle. If someone has a small application, they won’t need the product. However, we need good performance if we have huge applications like banking, airport, and insurance applications. Exadata provides the best performance. We can start with the least expensive configuration.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Oracle Exadata for transaction processing and data warehousing.

What I like best about Oracle Exadata is its good performance. It's also a very fast solution.

A room for improvement in Oracle Exadata is that it's not very easy to use in a microservices environment. It's not easy to split databases, and if this was easier to do in Oracle Exadata, it would make the solution better.

What I'd like to see in the next release of Oracle Exadata is for it to become more modular, so you can use it in a context where the data layer is spread between many independent services.

I've been working with Oracle Exadata for ten years.

The stability of Oracle Exadata is okay, and on a scale of one to five, I'm giving it a four.

Oracle Exadata is a very scalable solution, and I'm rating it five out of five in terms of scalability.

We're happy with Oracle Exadata support, though there's always room for improvement. In the years we've contacted them, we've reached a good balance between pricing and service. They deserve a four out of five in terms of support.

We used AIX and Db2, and currently, we're still switching our databases over to Oracle Exadata.

I wasn't involved in setting up Oracle Exadata because there's a dedicated team responsible for the setup.

The deployment process took a bit of time because my company switched gradually from other technologies to Oracle Exadata, and at the moment, some of the databases are still being moved to the solution. It's a big installation because I work for a big company.

A mix of in-house teams and vendor teams was responsible for setting up and implementing Oracle Exadata.

I have no idea about the ROI from Oracle Exadata because my team doesn't calculate it.

Oracle Exadata is not a cheap solution. Pricing is a problem for Oracle, and every client, not just my company, would like the vendor to improve on the price, or lower the price.

My company paid for several years' worth of Oracle Exadata licenses. You need to pay for the technical support and other features separately, on different contracts.

In terms of affordability, my rating for Oracle Exadata is two out of five.

Oracle Exadata is deployed on the cloud, but for databases, deployment is on-premises.

My company has twenty thousand users of applications based on Oracle Exadata. My company develops internal applications given to users, and the applications have persistent layers in Oracle.

My rating for Oracle Exadata is eight out of ten.

My company is an Oracle customer.

My advice to new users is to start small and implement Oracle Exadata incrementally. Don't implement it with a big bang approach. Do it piece by piece. The solution is good for big companies because I belong to a big company, but my company did the implementation one piece at a time.

There's a plan to increase the usage of Oracle Exadata because some of the older databases still need to be moved from Unix. Some of the databases in Db2 will also be moved to Oracle Exadata.

The primary use case of the solution was mainly for data warehousing and high-workload big data analytics.

The solution gives a boost in performance which gives developers more time to work on business topics.

The most valuable feature is storage offloading. If properly used, it will increase performance dramatically.

The handling of temp space has room for improvement. Oracle can make the handling of temp space better and faster. I would like to have locally attached temp space that would improve the solution.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for ten years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability a ten out of ten.

My customer had 10,000 people on the box without any degradation.

The initial contact with technical support is bad and slow. You need to get to the developers to have proper support. But this is time consuming and long lasting.

Neutral

While I never did it myself, the setup is straightforward, once the initial configuration is defined.

The cost of the solution is high. But there are situations where no alternatives exist.

Initially, we compared Oracle Exadata to the existing HP servers. As an appliance, Oracle Exadata includes everything, storage, hardware, and servers, so you get better performance from one vendor.

If you run it properly, the system is very stable and gives good performance. Running the box can be done with a handful of engineers.

Oracle Exadata is our calling and banking solution that provides an emergency financial system for our process. The system also collects data from Oracle databases, which requires the manpower of qualified engineers.

According to the engineering team, and I agree, the most valuable features are the voucher, certification, and quick support. 

The problem resolution times with the solution are much higher. This information is based on our databases and our drive.

The cost of the solution is high and can be improved.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I give the stability of the solution an eight out of ten.

To scale up with Oracle we have to purchase new infrastructure. I give the scalability a six out of ten.

We previously used Sophos for a ten-year run.

The solution is already reconfigured but not the system, only the semantics. Our network cables and the valves, the main areas such as the connectivity part, that's the network. Once they are completed and databases are accessible the configuration part has to be done. Overall the initial setup is straightforward and according to the manager's words, it's convenient to be able to reconfigure the system on the solution.

The ease of setup is an eight out of ten.

The deployment is not done overnight. In order to ensure our system management has little impact on the business area, the deployment is done in stages. Bringing on a new version update would only take a few days to test and test the environment. We have to verify and extract some information in order to improve the environment. Once all the testing is complete, we can move into the live environment. Full deployment will take one and a half to two months.

I give the pricing of the solution a five out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

When it comes to Oracle, I think it's a good investment. I know it's not cheap, but they offer excellent service and support. They are always looking to improve and customize their services, which is why my organization continues to use Oracle.

We have 5,000 employees in the organization. More than 2,000 people use our platform daily. This means my team, supported by Oracle and our co-banking system running on Oracle, is prepared for at least 2,000 people to use the solution daily.

New users should have the proper technical knowledge of the operator and that only requires having the right tools and contacting Oracle for support. Another important factor is the company's aftersales support. This ensures that we will be able to get the necessary care and service we need in order to keep our solution running smoothly. Plus, it's always good to have a company we can count on for renewing our solution the following year.