Oracle Exadata and Snowflake compete in the data warehousing and OLTP applications category. Snowflake seems to have the upper hand with its scalability and ease of use in cloud environments.
Features: Oracle Exadata is known for various performance-enhancing features including Smart Scan, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and Smart Flash Cache, which boost performance and storage efficiency. Snowflake, a cloud-based platform, emphasizes ease of use and scalability, allowing users to access data in multiple formats and integrate effortlessly with existing environments. It also provides the benefit of scaling computing units and storage independently.
Room for Improvement: Oracle Exadata requires a high investment and faces challenges with support services, setup complexity, and virtualization performance. Snowflake could improve on comprehensive support for traditional analytics and AI capabilities, as well as governance and cost transparency.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Oracle Exadata's specialized hardware can make deployment challenging and costly, though support options like Platinum Support are available. Snowflake is generally easier to deploy in cloud environments with good customer service, though clearer pricing models are occasionally needed.
Pricing and ROI: Oracle Exadata involves a high upfront cost, suitable for large enterprises, but performance benefits can justify the expense. Snowflake's usage-based pricing is ideal for businesses valuing agility, though clearer cost forecasting could improve its perceived cost-effectiveness.
The investment is good, which is why people choose this hardware.
If I were to rate their support from one to ten, I would say between nine to ten.
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.
I received great support in migrating data to Snowflake, with quick responses and innovative solutions.
I am satisfied with the work of technical support from Snowflake; they are responsive and helpful.
The technical support from Snowflake is very good, nice, and efficient.
Within a site, scalability is excellent.
Snowflake is very scalable and has a dedicated team constantly improving the product.
The billing doubles with size increase, but processing does not necessarily speed up accordingly.
Recently, Snowflake has introduced streaming capabilities, real-time and dynamic tables, along with various connectors.
Once installed, Exadata is very stable.
Snowflake is very stable, especially when used with AWS.
Snowflake as a SaaS offering means that maintenance isn't an issue for me.
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.
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.
Enhancements in user experience for data observability and quality checks would be beneficial, as these tasks currently require SQL coding, which might be challenging for some users.
What things you are going with to ask the support and how we manage the relationship matters a lot.
If more connectors were brought in and more visibility features were added, particularly around cost tracking in the FinOps area, it would be beneficial.
I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
I find its pricing reasonable and cost-effective for large organizations, but for smaller organizations, it may not be that useful.
Snowflake's pricing is on the higher side.
Snowflake lacks transparency in estimating resource usage.
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.
If a customer cannot tune their applications, this will help them to run the database and run the application without any tuning itself.
We had a comparison with Databricks and Snowflake a few months back, and this auto-scaling takes an edge within Snowflake; that's what our observation reflects.
I have used the Snowflake Zero-Copy Cloning feature in the past while prototyping data in lower environments. This feature is helpful as it saves a lot of time during the data replication process.
Snowflake is a data lake on the cloud where all processing happens in memory, resulting in very fast query responses.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Snowflake | 10.4% |
| Oracle Exadata | 9.9% |
| Other | 79.7% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 47 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 14 |
| Large Enterprise | 86 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 29 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 20 |
| Large Enterprise | 58 |
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
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."
Snowflake provides a modern data warehousing solution with features designed for seamless integration, scalability, and consumption-based pricing. It handles large datasets efficiently, making it a market leader for businesses migrating to the cloud.
Snowflake offers a flexible architecture that separates storage and compute resources, supporting efficient ETL jobs. Known for scalability and ease of use, it features built-in time zone conversion and robust data sharing capabilities. Its enhanced security, performance, and ability to handle semi-structured data are notable. Users suggest improvements in UI, pricing, on-premises integration, and data science functions, while calling for better transaction performance and machine learning capabilities. Users benefit from effective SQL querying, real-time analytics, and sharing options, supporting comprehensive data analysis with tools like Tableau and Power BI.
What are Snowflake's Key Features?
What Benefits Should You Look for?
In industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, Snowflake's flexible data warehousing and analytics capabilities facilitate cloud migration, streamline data storage, and allow organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources for advanced insights and AI-driven strategies. Its integration with analytics tools supports comprehensive data analysis and reporting tasks.
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