Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Databricks vs Oracle Exadata comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Databricks enhances efficiency and ROI, offering scalable solutions and cost savings over traditional Hadoop with easy setup.
Sentiment score
6.3
Oracle Exadata offers early break-even, reduced costs, increased performance, and significant savings despite complex licensing challenges.
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
The investment is good, which is why people choose this hardware.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Databricks' support is generally praised for responsiveness, though some note delays, with resources often sufficient for independent problem-solving.
Sentiment score
6.5
Oracle Exadata support praised for expertise, but critiques focus on delays and process efficiency improvement needs.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features.
Exadata comes with a platinum gateway and comprehensive support, which often gets immediate attention with severity one cases.
This involved creating blueprints for integrating Oracle products into client systems, followed by technical presentations to Oracle teams and stakeholders.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Databricks is praised for its adaptability, scalability, automation features, and performance across industries but needs improved autoscaling control.
Sentiment score
7.5
Oracle Exadata offers efficient scalability with flexible configurations, easy expansion, and high costs; ensure compatible hardware generations.
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.
Within a site, scalability is excellent.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is highly rated for stability and performance, with occasional minor issues often due to user or external factors.
Sentiment score
7.8
Oracle Exadata is praised for reliability and stability, with improved models offering redundancy and high availability, minimizing downtime.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
Once installed, Exadata is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Databricks should improve visualization, integration, user experience, and scalability, addressing concerns about pricing, error messages, and onboarding.
Oracle Exadata needs cost management, simplified patching, improved support, better customization, enhanced security, and third-party integration.
Adjusting features like worker nodes and node utilization during cluster creation could mitigate these failures.
We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly.
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
I cannot create an extended rack cluster with one node on one site and another node on a different site.
There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and customization options.
 

Setup Cost

Databricks offers flexible, often expensive pricing, mitigated by cloud deployment and tiered licensing, with varied user cost experiences.
Oracle Exadata's high costs are justified by its performance and reliability, offering value through reduced operational expenses.
It is not a cheap solution.
I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Databricks offers an intuitive interface for data processing, integrating SQL, Python, and features like Delta Lake and MLflow.
Oracle Exadata enhances performance, handles large databases efficiently, and simplifies management with advanced features and intelligent storage capabilities.
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
It also offers high backend speed between self-storage units and servers, which is beneficial for processing.
The most valuable features of Oracle Exadata are its high availability and cluster environment.
 

Categories and Ranking

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (8th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Streaming Analytics (1st)
Oracle Exadata
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
129
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow
Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
A solid data warehouse for transactional data that needs to be priced more competitively
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
What do you like most about Oracle Exadata?
It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata?
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...
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata?
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 perfo...
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
PayPal, EBS, Organic Food Retailer, Garmin, University of Minnesota, Major Semiconductor Company, Deutsche Bank, Starwood, Ziraat Bank, SK Telecom, and P&G.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks vs. Oracle Exadata and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.