Amazon Redshift vs Oracle Exadata comparison

What is Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a fully administered, petabyte-scale cloud-based data warehouse service. Users are able to begin with a minimal amount of gigabytes of data and can easily scale up to a petabyte or more as needed. This will enable them to utilize their own data to develop new intuitions on how to improve business processes and client relations.

Initially, users start to develop a data warehouse by initiating what is called an Amazon Redshift cluster or a set of nodes. Once the cluster has been provisioned, users can seamlessly upload data sets, and then begin to perform data analysis queries. Amazon Redshift delivers super-fast query performance, regardless of size, utilizing the exact SQL-based tools and BI applications that most users are already working with today.

The Amazon Redshift service performs all of the work of setting up, operating, and scaling a data warehouse. These tasks include provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing up the cluster, and applying patches and upgrades to the Amazon Redshift engine.

Amazon Redshift Functionalities

Amazon Redshift has many valuable key functionalities. Some of its most useful functionalities include:

• Cluster administration: The Amazon Redshift cluster is a group of nodes that contains a leader node and one (or more) compute node(s). The compute nodes needed are dependent on the data size, amount of queries needed, and the query execution functionality desired.
  
• Cluster snapshots: Snapshots are backups of a cluster from an exact point in time. Amazon Redshift offers two types of snapshots: manual and automated. Amazon will store these snapshots internally in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) utilizing an SSL connection. Whenever a Snapshot restore is needed, Amazon Redshift will create a new cluster and will import data from the snapshot as directed. 
  
• Cluster access: Amazon Redshift provides several intuitive features to help define connectivity rules, encrypt data and connections, and control the overall access of your cluster.
  
• IAM credentials and AWS accounts: The Amazon Redshift cluster is only accessible by the AWS account that created the cluster. This automatically secures the cluster and keeps it safe. Inside the AWS account, users access the AWS Identity and IAM protocol to create additional user accounts and manage permissions, granting specified users the desired access needed to control cluster performance.
  
• Encryption: Users have the option to choose to encrypt the clusters for additional added security once the cluster is provisioned. When encryption is enabled, Amazon Redshift will store all the data in user-created tables in a secure encrypted format. To manage Amazon Redshift encryption keys, users will access AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

Reviews from Real Users

“Redshift's versioning and data security are the two most critical features. When migrating into the cloud, it's vital to secure the data. The encryption and security are there.” - Kundan A., Senior Consultant at Dynamic Elements AS

“With the cloud version whenever you want to deploy, you can scale up, and down, and it has a data warehousing capability. Redshift has many features. They have enriched and elaborate documentation that is helpful.”- Aishwarya K., Solution Architect at Capgemini

Oracle Exadata allows enterprises to run any Oracle Database workload with the highest performance, scale, availability, and security on fully compatible cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Exadata uses a scale-out design with unique optimizations that include persistent memory, SQL query offload, and built-in resource management to optimize performance for OLTP, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads running in consolidated environments. By running hundreds or thousands of optimized Autonomous Database and Exadata Database instances on Exadata Cloud or Cloud@Customer infrastructure, customers are able to minimize their infrastructure, reduce management, improve developer productivity, and lower total costs by up to 40%, as described in Wikibon’s analysis (PDF).

The main benefit of Exadata is its speed. It hosts operating systems, CPU memory, and hard drives. It runs all types of databases, including online transaction systems, processors, and data warehouses, while remedying the poor performances of older databases.

Oracle Exadata features a simple and fast database storage system that protects and backs up your critical data. It accelerates data warehouse performance for faster access to business information and data. It is the ideal database solution for companies looking to build up their infrastructure from scratch.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine Key Benefits

• Rapid, reliable, and scalable deployment: Exadata is the most cost-efficient and highest performance platform for running Oracle databases. Exadata’s deployment is very straightforward since the database servers, storage servers, and network are pre-configured, pre-tuned and pre-tested by Oracle experts. This ensures that all your components work seamlessly together. Any Oracle Database application can be seamlessly migrated to and from the Exadata Database Machine, with no changes to the original application.
  
  
• Powerful, cutting-edge hardware: Exadata is the most versatile database platform. It uses powerful database servers and a scaled-out, intelligent storage layer.
  
  

• Accelerate database processing: Exadata Storage Server implements a unique, highly efficient database-optimized storage infrastructure that enables Exadata’s unparalleled performance without any of the bottlenecks that traditional storage experiences. Each storage server contains CPU processors that are used to offload database processing. The CPUs in the storage servers do not replace database CPUs, but work alongside them to accelerate database workloads.

Reviews from Real Users

Oracle Exadata stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its robust performance and its wide variety of database features that make it a comprehensive database solution.

Adriano S., an IT system integrator at a financial services firm, writes, "Oracle Exadata's performance is one of its best features. We are 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 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."

Paulo X., a sales manager at LTA-RH Informatica, notes, "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."