We performed a comparison between Oracle Exadata and Snowflake based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Snowflake wins out in this comparison, as it has a better user rating regarding both ease of deployment and pricing.
"What I like most about Oracle Exadata is its smart scan feature. I also like that it supports higher capacities and it's high-performing, so my company can use Oracle Exadata for massive databases."
"The performance of the data is the most important part."
"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."
"Oracle has reliable solutions and this one is no different."
"Exadata is a fantastic machine. Two features stand out. The first is the resource input/output management tool that allows you to manage the resources to the neck on the Exadata box."
"The new Exadata x9m has an even higher speed of 100GBps connectivity."
"On-premises Exadata is just as stable as the cloud version. It's a very stable platform."
"Parallelism is the most valuable feature."
"Snowflake is a database, and it is very good and useful. The most interesting part is that memory management is very good in Snowflake. For a business intelligence project, SQL Server is taking a lot of time for reporting services. There are a lot of calculations, and the reporting time is shown as two minutes, whereas Snowflake is taking just two seconds for the same reporting services."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"The product's most important feature is unloading data to S3."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available."
"The most valuable features are the clustering, LS50, being able to change the size, the pay per use feature, the flexibility with many different sources and analytic applications."
"A user-friendly and reliable solution."
"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
"Patching must be simplified."
"Checking the Smart Scan issues is complicated."
"There is one aspect to Exadata that I dislike, and that's the inconsistency with other databases. When you try to get Exadata to function with another type of database like SQL, or others, there should be reliable and consistent operation. When this is improved on, we should start to see more applications growing the market."
"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 have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"Certification should also be improved. Today, Oracle doesn't certify applications with engineered systems."
"The technical support is in need of improvement."
"Tech support sometimes takes some time to identify and rectify issues."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
"Currently, Snowflake doesn't support unstructured data."
"For the Snowflake database, there should be some third-party features for the ETL. It would also be good to be able to use some kind of controls to get the data either from another database or a flat file. Its price should be improved. It should be cheaper than Microsoft."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
"The scheduling system can definitely be better because we had to use external airflow for that. There should be orchestration for the scheduling system. Snowflake currently does not support machine learning, so it is just storage. They also need some alternatives for SQL Query. There should also be support for Spark in different languages such as Python."
"There are always a few operation updates here and there that can be made."
"It needs a bit more rigor and governance, which is something you don't get with newer tools. This makes it less enterprise scalable. Its governance and structure can be enhanced, which would really be valuable. I would like to see some kind of prebuilt functionality in terms of having almost like a pre-built data warehouse. A functionality for generating automated kind of pieces would be good."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
Oracle Exadata is ranked 2nd in Data Warehouse with 124 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. Oracle Exadata is rated 8.4, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Oracle Exadata writes "Very fast, scalable, stable, and demonstrates good performance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Oracle Exadata is most compared with Oracle Database Appliance, Teradata, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Amazon Redshift and VMware Tanzu Greenplum, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Dremio. See our Oracle Exadata vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
This is a large and complex question and depends on the use case and scale. Each platform has its advantages and there are significant pros and cons for each platform. I am an independent consultant; I teach courses about these platforms and how to select one; and I advise clients.
If you would like to have a discussion about your requirements, the tradeoffs, and how to go about getting the best platform for your business, please email me at richard@wintercorp.com or book me online (no charge) at solvethepuzzle.biz