Oracle Database Appliance Reviews

I use Oracle databases with multiple clients mainly for analyzing financial transactions. They use it to find the profit and loss for each and every day of trading activity.

Finding out out a single day's profit and loss used to take them almost seven days to calculate. For example, if they wanted to find out something new, they could find the profit and loss of the day's data only by the following week. So we introduced Oracle Database Appliance for the extra data and to gather all the information we have across all the systems. We built a warehouse database that will accommodate all the information and we reduced the time to determine the entire transactions of P and L into a single day.

The Oracle database is able to get the data, process it, and return it to the company's CEO's and CFO's within a single day, and thus they are able to find out yesterday's P and L by today. It has drastically reduced the amount and time of processing from seven days to one day. This is our main use for Oracle. The business intelligence and data warehousing features are the best part of Oracle Database Appliance.

It could be that we may not be using Oracle and GoldenGate in the way we are supposed to be using them. We have faced a couple of issues with GoldenGate. Whenever we have issues, the Oracle support will take the time to understand how GoldenGate works. The stability of the GoldenGate could be improved, although it is pretty stable.

In terms of Database Appliance, the important thing is how you design it. If the underlying design is good, then Oracle will perform exactly how we want it to perform. But if the underlying design or the underlying architecture is bad, then Oracle is not going to give the expert the results he needs. It all depends upon the developer who designs it. I haven't seen any drawback with the Oracle database assets, and for the past five years I've been using it in our team.

In terms of what can be improved, I'd say Artificial Intelligence, AI. It would be really helpful if AI was incorporated into the solution.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Oracle Database Appliance an eight.

I've been using Oracle Database Appliance for five years. I moved to AWS Cloud Platform and now we are migrating the Oracle appliances to the Cloud Platform, which is an AWS platform as a service.

Oracle Database Appliance is really reliable. The stability and scalability of Oracle Database are reliable. I would say that it is more reliable than scalable. With the 19c, I've seen that it is stable in most cases but we had certain issues when we tried to create scale on 12c. We had issues when we used the previous, older version of Oracle, 12c. It was not that easy to use 12c because we had to get certain hardware. 

In terms of scalability, it is not bad. It was not that easy to scale. I don't think it's easily scalable.

I think more than 400 or 600 people are using it in the company.

Their technical support is really good. It has really good products and I'm pretty satisfied.

The initial setup of Database Appliance is straightforward. But It depends upon the applications that you're using.

If you want to use it on top of the database, it's going to be straightforward. But if you want to do it at some other part of the process the third party client has to do an APA call. It depends upon the way they implement it. If it's going to be a third party vendor using it he'll have to make APA calls, then it's going to be a bit complex.

I would recommend Oracle Database Appliance. Oracle is the benchmark in the field. Still, I would recommend you doing a proof of concept with Oracle Database first and then consider the other databases.

The features that they're providing as skills are the solution's most valuable aspect.

The solution is simple to use and easy to maintain.

The testing aspect of the solution could be improved. Right now, it's done by us, but if they'd improve it with tools that would make things easier.

If we were able to use Oracle Database to create mobile apps, that would be great. I don't know multiple languages, like Java, etc. I need to learn a separate language, right now in order to do this.

We primarily use the solution for data storage.

The solution does crash. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen occasionally.

The solution is scalable. We have a few hundred people using the solution currently.

We've never been in touch with technical support. We don't have the internet password needed to connect. We typically use a third party if we require assistance.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as an operational system.

The performance of the system is the solution's most valuable aspect. In combination with the database, it gives perfect results. It's a better system than using other kinds of integrated systems. In general, the ODA control is much simpler to use and offers up the best performance.

Technical support could be much better. The maintenance for an enterprise system isn't so great. It's also much expensive.

A future release should improve the availability of networking interfaces.

Hardware expansions availability should be in-line with product support. 

The solution should have the ability to offer an integrated management dashboard with virtualized systems and oracle DB manager in all DB supported versions.

The machine should have a visual monitoring interface, not also for hardware but also to DB and virtualized hosts.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues over the past two years.

We're not too pleased with technical support. The cost to have access to them is way too much money.

The initial setup was fairly quick. It was easy to deploy.

The pricing of the solution is fair but the technical support pricing is quite high.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a very good system.

Report processing time has been reduced. We can use it in the future for our BI tool.

The performance due to the all-flash of ODA is very nice. 

The main thing would be to make ODA more affordable, to make it a more economical machine. Also, I would like to see virtualization, so you could implement all of your functions on one machine. Finally, improvement in the speed and performance would be good.

Stability is very good. There has been no downtime.

Scalability means you can increase the storage. 

ODA support is very good. Oracle support is very good. Online support is very good. Our local partner is also very good.

Previously I was using Exadata. Our technical team was already familiar with Oracle products so that's why we choose ODA. We had a license for Oracle Database.

When selecting a vendor the main criterion is support. Oracle support is very good.

The initial setup was very easy.

My advice would depend on the needs of the company. If the need is like ours, number of transactions per day, number of transactions per year; and whether the operation time is 24 hours, eight hours; these are the types of things to consider when deciding. Also, what is the downtime you can afford?

ODA performance has been very good for our requirements.

I would rate it at eight out of 10 because the product is stable, it has very low downtime, and the support of Oracle is very good.

Our primary use case is OLTP.

Cost.                                                                                                                                         .

Oracle RAC.                                                        .

Patching: Oracle Database Appliance patching comes out two to three months after the regular patching cycle.                     .

In regards to licensing, it is cheaper to maintain for Oracle applications, and it's an all-in-one solution.

We had been using a separate server, separate storage, and a separate switch for our Oracle Database, which was costing us a lot of money, because you have to have licenses for each of those devices. But now we have all of them in just one box. We don't have to buy a separate switch. We don't have to buy separate storage. We have everything in just one box.

That's the advantage. It has been cost effective. They have really helped us on that line.

Currently in Ghana, where I work, there are just a few companies that can afford it, because the price is a little bit high. Even though for the private sector it's not that high, if this would come in much smaller boxes, and much cheaper, it would be much more affordable for SMBs, that's small and medium businesses. That would be helpful.

It's very, very stable. From the day of installation we did not have any challenges with this product.

Scalability is not limited. It's scalable because you can add a standard device to the storage space. You are just looking at storage space. You are not looking for memory, because the memory range is high enough. And the capacity is also very fast.

I've worked with HPE, I've worked with other vendors' support. In terms of phone support, I get faster response from Oracle. The support is the highest standard I've seen. They will get to you by all means, and attend to you, the challenges that you have, and in a timely manner. They have the expertise and they have the know-how. The first time we contact them, our issue is solved.

The reason for our switching is that we wanted an all-in-one solution across databases, and we need to implement an all-in-one solution for our customers' databases. This is very simplified, it's easy to use, you can be in production immediately when you buy the product. That's why we went that direction.

If you work with other companies, you often see a lot of challenges because the storage is usually separate. If they have all-in-one, the licenses are too expensive. What Oracle did was they reduced the price because we are buying their solution. They reduced the prices for the Oracle licenses.

I can set it up in a matter of a very short time. The worst case scenario is an hour, and that happens only if I don't have the information from the customer, That's when it would take an hour. But if I have all the information in front of me, the box can be set up and ready to use.

We had two products in mind. We had a product from HPE, but we did not go with that product because it required us getting extended storage. We were looking at space in the datacenter; we don't have a lot of rack space in the data center. So, we factored all of that into our decision, and then we decided on Oracle.

In addition, it was the licenses, because we use Oracle, and when you buy their product they reduce the cost for you. So, I could use an Oracle database and buy an HPE product where I will not have a reduction in price for licenses. You have to leverage that opportunity from Oracle.

I give it a nine out of 10 because it gives the customer easy access to a complete database solution within 30 minutes. That is, someone can go live with in 30 minutes of buying the product, it's very fast to use. For instance, if you have a small company that you want to set up, and you don't need to put your infrastructure on the cloud, you buy this product and you are ready to go in the next 30 minutes. That's one of the reasons why I give it that rating. 

As well, it's easier to manage, because you have a central point of management which is the Oracle ODA. You can manage it by using the browser interface. 

Database consolidation and for X6-2L also database performance improvement due to NVMe storage being used, which dramatically increases I/O performance

We value the appliance architecture with its “everything-in-a-box” highly standardized setup.

For the new ODA X6-2 models there is a possibility to deploy also SE/SE2 databases in a bare-metal deployment as well as the boosted I/O performance due to NVMe Flash disks.

For one customer it consolidated several databases from several Windows physical servers into one single ODA and resulted in increased stability.

For another customer it was used to “isolate” the last Oracle database system on one single ODA, thereby freeing-up SAN storage and rack server slots used by an old Linux cluster.

The following issues need some attention:

• Ease of administration and deployment. With ODA X6-2 there are different “OAK” administration commands for the S/M/L models (e.g. “odacli”) compared to the HA model ("oakcli").
• In my opinion only one single command should be used for all ODA models, as it’s confusing.
• Some of the new commands have limitations/restrictions, though I assume they’ll be improved over time.

We have been using the solution since 2012. We implemented 2x ODA V1 systems.

With the X6-2L we had a couple of early replacements, e.g. PCI card and battery

We only had a stability issue with the ODA V1 due to an ASM disk mount issue (“ORA-600 [KFDJOIN3]”, bug). This issue delayed the go-live for production databases, but was fixed with the assistance of Oracle Support relatively fast.

We only had a scalability issue regarding local storage, especially on the ODA V1.

I would rate the technical support as six out of 10. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found that the quality of Oracle Support first-level has decreased.

We used custom-built single-server or cluster solutions. The ODA provides a high degree of standardization.

The initial deployment of 2x ODA V1s was accomplished in one day, including unpacking and rack-mounting.

Leverage the Pay-As-You-Grow licensing, and consider using the ODA X6-2 S/M/L models also for SE2/SE.

We evaluated Exadata, which often is overkill for many small and medium sized databases.

If you go with 1x ODA then at least establish a Data Guard standby system on a Linux server, e.g. Public Cloud. I suggest to use 2x ODAs in each DR setup.

Nowadays, we migrate midsize EBS environments (EBS 11i, 12.1 and 12.2) to these machines. We use the machine as a consolidation environment and we also see a performance increase in the database layer.

Customers with limited licenses prefer this machine, as it has capacity-on-demand features which are completely aligned with Oracle licensing policies.

It is an easy-to-deploy database environment, which does not need much maintenance work. A DBA with knowledge of Oracle technologies, such as ASM and database, can manage it.

The system resources of this machine are quite enough for running midsize Oracle databases but, if there is a need, customers can expand their disk and memory resources.

This machine is also used as a standby database environment, especially for customers who have ODA HA or Exadata in their primary sites, and want to have an affordable engineered system for their standby sites.

• Capacity on Demand: Valuable because we can configure the machine according to our licenses. When there is a need, we can directly increase or decrease the CPU cores of this machine.
• NVM Express (NVMe) solid-state drives: This technology brings outstanding I/O performance for midsize databases. We have tested it by doing POCs on customer sites and the results were quite satisfying.
• Virtualization: Using the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), we can virtualize this machine and run both databases and applications on it.
• Affordable price: When we think about the technology and the features that this machine delivers, the price seems to provide a lot of value.
• Engineered system: This machine is a 1U engineered system optimized, tested and delivered by Oracle. It is a ready-to-use, easy-to-deploy environment for running Oracle products.
• Support for multiple database versions: Both 11.2.0.4 and 12c databases are supported with this machine.
• Support for multiple database editions: Both Standard edition and Enterprise edition databases are supported with this machine.
• ODA X6-2 is easy to manage: It delivers management utilities such as odacli and virt-manager (for virtualization management).

Oracle ODA is a fixed server appliance. It would be improved if it were an engineered system with scale-out capabilities.

Virtualization features could also be improved. A web-based GUI would be a good start.

Also VM-specific features, which provide VM-level fault tolerancy, could be added to this product. (This improvement would depends on the scale-out capabilities).

I have used ODA X3, X4 and X5 models for three years. This ODA X6-2M is a new ODA model and I have used it the last six months.

None.

No issues, but there is room for improvement here. Currently, there is no scale-out option for any of the models in ODA family.

Quite good. When you buy this machine it is registered with Oracle. Any service request is created using this registration. SR creation and updates are fast.

Conventional systems. Most of the time, the reasons for switching are the optimal price and the promising features.

Straightforward. The whole environment is built in one hour by following the Oracle documentation and using the related utilities.

Get benefit from the capacity-on-demand features. License your cores according to your licenses.

Standard HP servers and other members of the ODA family (such as ODA X6-2S, L and HA).

To others looking into this product I would recommend they take a look at ODA X7, which has been released.

ODA X7 delivers more system resources and it also delivers Standard Edition Oracle Database support for the HA (High Availability) model.

Offers easy deployment and setup.

It hosts many applications and deploys ODA quickly.

Patching cycles have many bugs that need to be addressed.

Valuable features include an easy installation, good performance, and stability.

The physical installation is easy. They have single mode and high availability, depending on the budget. It has all-in-one features in it.

I would like to see some improvement in the capacity.

We have been supporting this solution for customers for three years. We are an Oracle gold partner company.

It is stable and there have not been any crashes.

Everybody can use it. It is scalable.

We opened a support ticket for the installation.

We have a customer who is using IBM or HPE. They are going to buy an Oracle database appliance for the scalability, installation, performance, and high available options. I think this is the reason they want to switch now. Scalability, high availability, easy installation, and good performance are the reasons to switch.

You can install all of your visual information on the Oracle database appliance. All of your software is on this virtual machine. Another option is to install your database on an older Oracle database appliance, which is recommended and has the best performance.

I don't know anything about license or prices.

Actually, we always focus on the Oracle products because we are Oracle partners. We didn't compare anything else. Based on the budget, Exadata systems are now in the new Oracle database appliances. There are three options: small, medium, and high availability. It depends on the customer's budget.

The physical installation is easy. They have single mode and high available mode options, depending on the budget. So it has all-in-one features in it.

It has an easy installation, good performance, and it is stable.

ODA has two most valuable features. First, it’s very easy to deploy. Once received, you can unpack it, rack it, install it in less than one day and having a fully usable machine very quickly.

The second feature is its scalability: you can start with a small configuration (regarding Oracle licensing) and then enable Oracle CPU depending on your needs.

Not my organization because I work as a consultant. But one of my customers who has bought an ODA started a database for 10 shops and then he grew the number of CPUs enabled each time he opened some new shops.

Only one time during an upgrade, because the customer made some modifications in the machine configuration and he forgot that ODA is an appliance, not a traditional platform. So you have to be careful when you want to modify the system. A better way to do it is to ask support, when in doubt.

Usually my customers switched to ODA because they didn’t have a full-time DBA in their organization, and they wanted an easy to use solution that can be installed and upgraded easily.

The initial setup is very straightforward. As said above, you can deploy the machine in less that one day. But, as it’s an appliance, if you are not very familiar with this kind of deployment, read the docs and ask support first.

Usually, the customers I work for who chose ODA have licensed their database with the enterprise edition and they usually buy the diagnostic pack and deploy an enterprise manager cloud control to easily administer their OD platform.

The Oracle Database Appliance offers a pay-as-you grow model for Oracle licenses. This model allows you to only license the CPU count that you need, rather than the entire capacity. When virtualized, this is supported for both the database and the application tier.

The solution has good stability and it is easy to work with. We quickly deployed both database and application workloads in a single appliance on a virtualized platform, based on Oracle VM

Customers cannot cluster multiple appliances together to create a larger cluster (beyond two servers), nor can they expand the internal disk storage of the system beyond two storage trays. This area can be improved.

I have used this solution for two years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I would rate the level of technical support 8/10.

I previously used Fresh Install.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

The pricing and licensing is worth it.

I did not really evaluate other options before choosing.

In my opinion, if your organization is constantly evolving and looking for less infrastructure support/planning for virtualization, then this solution is a one-stop-shop and a nice product. If you are a mid-pace organization and can handle regular databases or Exacta, then you can skip this step.

We value the following features:

• It is easily scalable.
• All patches (OS, DB) are bundled by Oracle, so patching dependencies are resolved.
• Oracle guarantees that the setup works if you keep up with the patches.

Setup of the server and database was easy. At a later point in time we decided to virtualize it, and the basic setup of the box was also quite easy.

The following issues need some attention:

• There is no option to combine a second ODA X2 in real application cluster mode. Therefore high availability is limited to same-cabinet RAC, and to offsite standby.
• Storage expansion was not possible for ODA X2 so we frequently ran into storage limitations.
• Even in an RAC setup it is not easy to avoid downtime because OS patching requires both nodes to be patched with very short overlapping.
• Apparently there is a way to avoid downtime, but we did not explore that option anymore because we added a remote standby.

We used the solution from 2012 to 2016.

We had some stability issues.

In the beginning, soon after initial setup and go-live, a bug caused one of the nodes to use all cores while on the other node only the requested cores where activated. This led to instability.

Also, later a hard disk caused instability while it was "dying".

We had an issue with scalability, but only in terms of storage.

Technical support was excellent.

We didn't use a previous solution. This solution was recommended by a consulting company because of ease of scalability and patching.

Initial setup was easy.

Pricing was reasonable given the high quality hardware parts used and the high availability.

I was not involved in evaluation of alternative solutions.

The ODA is a great server solution for mid-size companies but be aware of the limitations when it comes to real application cluster.

Also, make sure the solution provides enough disk storage for the life time of the product.

The most valuable feature is the ability to use it as a virtualization platform. This is great because you can run the Oracle Database layer as ODA_BASE domain and use Oracle VM templates to build Oracle applications as VMs so you can also have the application layer in the same platform.

It is easy in terms of management of virtual infrastructure. With "oakcli" is the all-in-one CLI to manipulate the virtual environment of the ODA.

It had a lot of bugs, especially with the old patch bundles. There was no support for connecting it to an FC tape drive for backups.

The ODA X3-2 has been up and running since August 2013. This was the first model of the appliance.

We had issues with the virtual infrastructure. Sometimes the shared repositories go into status Unknown, VMs crashing etc. Also the automatic failover of the VMs sometimes failed.

We had no issues with scalability. It allows only two disk enclosures for storage space, and for servers you can upgrade the RAM.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10.

Our previous solutions were building a high availability environment for Oracle Database with blocks, server storage OS, network configuration, etc.

The setup was very easy. It is great to have a fully configured and tested HA environment for Oracle Database in two days. All the built-in automation scripts do it for you.

If you compare the pricing of ODA vs traditional architecture it can be a bit high but you get more value by minimizing the risk, a short implementation time, and all-in-one patching.

There are no solutions like ODA.

Overall it is a great product for consolidating Oracle Databases.

With the newer models there are a lot of optimizations both in hardware and software. For example the cluster interconnect card went from 10GbE in ODA X3-2 to InfiniBand QDR in ODA X5-2. The "oakcli" has added features with the new patch bundles.

We value the following features:

• Performance (we used a bare-metal configuration so I don't know about using it as a virtual environment).
• Easy management (it saves a lot of installation and patching time).

This box allowed me to consolidate the three most critical databases in one single reliable server (it is actually two nodes in our machine).

The following issues need attention:

• I would be happy to see the Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) pre-installed in it instead of installing it in a separate machine.
• The Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) is quite slow. Sometimes the page takes ages to open.
• The shutdown procedure in this box is different from many other servers that I worked with. For example, when you shut down the server, you see the LEDs of the storage part still on, and there is no button for that part to turn the power off. You can only unplug the power socket!

We have been using the solution for two years.

We didn't encounter any stability issues.

There was a little scalability issue. We noticed that the storage dedicated to the system in one node was less than the other. We therefore needed to expand it. We needed Oracle support to do that for us but it was online and streamlined.

The technical support is very good, but not excellent.

I didn't use a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward but we had issues that needed Oracle support to fix for us.

Frankly I have no clue about pricing. The organization didn't have any issue about paying for the licenses.

There is one thing that you need to be aware of. When you buy this box, you buy licenses for a specific number of CPU cores. When you set up the box, you define how many cores you want to enable. If the number of cores that you enable is different from the number of cores that you have in your license, it will be so hard to fix it (according to the Oracle representative claim but I am not sure about that.)

We evaluated RAC servers from other vendors.

The biggest disadvantage of this server is its availability when you patch the whole machine, i.e. when you patch the entire ODA firmware, not the databases within it. When you do this kind of patching, you must restart the entire server and plan for downtime.

This box has a network subnetting IP address pre-configured in it for internal communication between the nodes.

If your network has the same network subnetting IP address, you must change it in your network. This box (as of x4-2 and I don't know about the new models) doesn't allow you to change its internal subnetting IP address.

Configurable installation pre-defined templates are available to meet your requirements.

It has led to improved performance, it saves maintenance costs, increases stability and reliability and is a single vendor solution.

Creating a VM on ODA could be improved.

We have been using the solution for two years.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

I would rate the technical support as 8/10.

We were using IBM P series AIX, using ODA ease patching, installation and support.

The setup was straightforward, as install and reinstall is configurable with predefined templates.

I recommend to get a discounted deal from Oracle, especially with the one time setup which was free.

We didn't really evaluate any alternatives.

It is highly recommended in an environment where no Sys Admin, Infrastructure and Network Team exists. DBA can rack and stack with the easily performed installation.

The biggest value that customers are seeing, is that it's easy to install, quick to deploy, and easy to consolidate platforms; as opposed to building an environment from scratch. When you get the ODA, all you must do is plug it in and run several commands to get it up and running. This allows for the time to deploy to be really fast. With the addition of the X6-2S, 2M and 2HA, there is a ODA platform that will suit SMB, mid-size and now large scale customer workloads.

Particularly interesting, is that now ODA 2S/M supports Standard Edition (SE2) database configurations, which is great for SMB and mid-size consolidation plays.

Moreover, the ODA X2-HA adds a new whole area for us and our customers, as it adds an all flash storage array option and virtualization capabilities; further improving consolidation densities.

The platform is primarily used for departmental mid-size companies, although I do know large companies that use it, because it’s a great platform for consolidating. It is unable to expand by much, because of the way the ODA configures when you have two nodes and X number of storage. Oracle has done a good job of letting it expand storage, but the number of nodes is still limited to two. This continues to be an issue for customers.

I have worked with ODA for the last five to six years.

It’s a very stable product. As with any other technology, in initial phases, it needed to be tested; but it has become a very solid platform with a large customer base.

The initial idea, was that ODA would be a scalable solution; allowing customers tostart with a small number of CPU’s and grow as the demand increased. As aprimarily consolidation platform, you can consolidate more, by moving move up the CPU’s as needed; pricing goes along with that too.

It’s a very solid platform. Oracle has been good at managing the support.

ODA was initially designed for setup to be easy. Once brought in-house, you plug it in, set up your network connection, run one or two commands, and then set up is complete. Even if it's in a virtualized environment, it's still easy to set up. The quick setup is the beauty and the added value that ODA brings, as opposed to other conversion or engineering systems, which take a little bit more time.

Upgrades are the same; due to its automation, many of the commands, designed by the Oracle development team, allow for easy upgrades for the entire end-to-end stack.

It's a very low-cost, simplistic solution, especially from the infrastructure side. If you have minimal staff and a mid-size environment, this is a perfect platform.

It has many valuable features, including High Availability and failover. This means you can have an all-ERP solution in one box, so you can use your database with your application server together.

My clients like the failover feature, which is included for free.

It takes too long to implement and Oracle should do something about it. They also need to perform more R&D on new releases before releasing it into the marketplace.

I've performed many deployments of it over the last two years.

There were a lot of issues during delivery, but once it was fully implemented, there were only minor deployment issues.

There were a lot of issues during delivery, but once it was fully implemented, there were only minor stability issues.

There were a lot of issues during delivery but once it was fully implemented, there were only minor scalability issues.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I am part of a vendor team that does the implementations for our clients.

It's so complex that you will need an expert to implement it.