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Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
89
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (3rd), Managed NoSQL Databases (1st), Vector Databases (3rd)
Oracle Exadata Cloud at Cus...
Ranking in Database as a Service (DBaaS)
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Database as a Service (DBaaS) category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is 1.6%. The mindshare of Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer is 3.9%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

MichaelJohn - PeerSpot reviewer
Very efficient for application-facing scenarios
There are several areas for improvement. Firstly, having a local development emulator or simulator for Azure Cosmos DB would be beneficial. It would be very handy to have a Docker container that developers can use locally. Although, I know there is a free tier and so on and so forth, having a local environment would be nice. For example, SQL Server is very portable. You can even install it on your machine. That is the number one thing that is missing in Azure Cosmos DB. The second improvement area is the IDE of choice. That means how you interact with Azure Cosmos DB. For example, with SQL Server, you have SQL Server Management Studio. I know there is a little bit of support for Azure Cosmos DB in Azure Data Studio, but it is not heavily advertised or it does not feel like first-class citizen support. Developer experience or developer tooling is missing in terms of interacting with the database. Better developer tools or an IDE for interacting with Azure Cosmos DB would enhance the developer experience. Lastly, there is some mixed messaging about what Azure Cosmos DB is, given its multiple APIs. There are so many Azure Cosmos DB APIs available. There is NoSQL. There are MongoDB, Gremlin, and others. There is still some mixed messaging for others who are new to Azure Cosmos DB about what Azure Cosmos DB is. Is this like MongoDB, but then there is also MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB? I know it well, and I know that the default one is just NoSQL, but others I have interacted with over the last ten years or so get confused.
RODRIGOPETERSON - PeerSpot reviewer
Leverages cloud capabilities and offers minimal latency with operation model
Customers have less operational burden and more responsibility regarding the management of hardware. Increasing the scale of Oracle Exadata Cloud provides more capacity, higher performance, and expanded storage, CPU, and memory resources. If you need to scale Oracle's capacity up or down, the appliance can be adjusted on-premise. When you purchase Oracle Exadata Cloud, you must acquire either a half or full rack. If you need to increase capacity, you can scale up by adding more hardware. This hardware commitment lasts four to five years, meaning you must maintain this infrastructure and continue payments for that period. While you can scale up to meet increased demands, scaling down is more challenging. I recommend the solution when the customer desires to transition to a cloud-native solution but needs to retain their data in OpenEdge due to compatibility issues or the requirement to interact with on-premise systems to minimize latency. This solution offers minimal latency and modernizes Oracle capabilities through a gateway. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest benefit it offers is scalability. It's easier to work with concurrency and updating data."
"The autoscale feature is the most useful for us."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB has helped to improve efficiency, providing good response times and allowing the storage of AI process results, which is crucial for feedback loops."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is fast, and its performance is good compared to normal SQL DB."
"Cosmos DB is a document database that stores data in JSON format for faster retrieval of unstructured data. I personally appreciate the speed, which is significantly better for unstructured data, especially since Cosmos DB had JSON as a data type early on."
"rate Azure support nine out of 10. They respond quickly and will help you manage costs. However, they mainly give you an overview of the issue, so they'll never have an in-depth idea of what you're doing. They aren't the owners of our product, so they don't know much about it, but they can ask you generally: What are you doing? Are you doing too many updates? How can we reduce the cost?"
"The solution's read capacity and write access functions are very fast so users don't have to wait when fetching or displaying data on a screen."
"Cosmos DB performs exceptionally well and has not caused any issues that necessitate adjustments in nodes for improved performance."
"The most valuable feature is that it is based on Exadata infrastructure, which is Oracle 's leading engineered system that is trusted, fault-tolerant, and has unique performance features."
"I like that Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer is a stable, well-positioned product in the market today, and it's very scalable."
"The operation model is the most valuable feature."
"I am particularly fond of the intelligent capabilities that enhance the backend, utilizing technology to analyze SQL queries."
"Performance has significantly improved."
"Exporting and importing is easy because of its cleanliness, making the process easier. However, setting up the Data Guard was more difficult. Despite this, the client experienced lower downtime."
 

Cons

"We had some performance issues with a data segregation query. We worked closely with Microsoft to solve the problem of performance where, for example, one query had a delay of almost two or three minutes for this one use case. Microsoft tried to improve the product, but in the end, the solution was to change to MongoDB. MongoDB had better performance."
"There are no particular factors that need improvement. There is a little bit of a learning curve with scaling workloads, but it works smoothly."
"If we have a lot of data, doing a real-time vector search is a performance challenge because the search happens over a large dataset. It consumes more time."
"The one thing that I have been working on with Microsoft with regard to this is the ability to easily split partitions and have it do high-performance cross-partition queries. That is the only place where either our data size or our throughput has grown beyond one partition, so being able to do cross-partition queries efficiently would be my number one request."
"The biggest problem is the learning curve and other database services like RDS."
"I have been a devoted Microsoft fan, but Redis DB's memory caching capabilities are really making progress. Even if Cosmos DB is continuously improving and is quite advanced in the field of internal memory optimization, I would still recommend Redis DB to a customer."
"It's still new, and good training resources are harder to find. Even the most recent books on Cosmos DB are several years old, which is ancient in IT terms."
"A minor improvement would be enabling batch operations through the UI. Currently, to delete all documents in a collection, we must use an API, which some of my team finds inconvenient for admin tasks."
"For the data migration, we used ZDM. It was not integrated with the databases, and the documentation lacks clarity."
"A room for improvement in Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer is that they need to train more partners to gain more knowledge because currently, they are keeping a lot to themselves. For example, they are still keeping a lot of information on their campus, so information sharing is limited."
"The solution is expensive."
"Scalability is not straightforward."
"As a customer, you can't see the boot messages of your virtualized guest machines."
"We had some problems in the developer's environment. We had some problems with the initial installation environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Cosmos DB is generally a costly resource compared to other Azure resources. It comes with a high cost. We have reserved one thousand RUs. Free usage is also limited."
"The pricing for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is good. Initially, it seemed like an expensive way to manage a NoSQL data store, but so many improvements that have been made to the platform have made it cost-effective."
"Its price is in the middle, neither too low nor too high."
"Cosmos DB is expensive, and the RU-based pricing model is confusing. Although they have a serverless layer, there are deficiencies in what I can define and assign to a database. Estimating infrastructure needs is not straightforward, making it challenging to manage costs."
"Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB's licensing costs are monthly."
"The price of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could be a bit lower."
"Pricing is one of the solution's main features because it is based on usage, scales automatically, and is not too costly."
"Cosmos DB's pricing structure has significantly improved in recent months, both in terms of its pricing model and how charges are calculated."
"The price is too much."
"The machine and the cloud model itself already have licensing advantages."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Legal Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
The initial setup is simple and straightforward. You can set up a Cosmos DB in a day, even configuring things like availability zones around the world.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
Its cost is transparent. Pricing depends on the transaction and data size, but overall, it is cheaper compared to hosting it on your corporate network due to other factors like power consumption. C...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?
I had a challenging experience implementing the emulator with a Mac. I had to install the emulator in a Docker container because it is not natively compatible. A significant amount of time was spen...
What do you like most about Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer?
Exporting and importing is easy because of its cleanliness, making the process easier. However, setting up the Data Guard was more difficult. Despite this, the client experienced lower downtime.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer?
The pricing is reasonable due to a universal agreement, which often positions Oracle solutions better against others. I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer?
Scalability is not straightforward, as you can scale up and not down. Improvements could be made to make scalability more flexible.
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, MS Azure Cosmos DB
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TomTom, KPMG Australia, Bosch, ASOS, Mercedes Benz, NBA, Zero Friction, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Kinectify
IBVI, illycaffe, Scottish Water, trueblue, AirAsia, droptank
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.