Oracle Exadata Reviews

Primarily OLTP but report is done against a combination of Materialized Views and transactional tables.

We have a number of statistics collected before cutover on our legacy environment compared to Exadata. Without doing anything other than copying the data across, we saw significant performance gains for most key processes. We receive feedback from users stating how fast the performance is compared to other systems. Performance issues are few and far between. Our database environment is extremely stable compared to the legacy DB configuration. We upgraded from a X2-2 quarter rack to a X5-2 eighth rack and experienced significant performance gains. We recently performed another technology refresh to a X7-2 so obviously, we've been very pleased with the initial investment. For this deployment, we decided to virtualize the Exadata configuration, providing some additional flexibility to our operational environment.

We primarily run OLTP with some reporting. With that being said, the feature that provides us the most performance gains is the Smart Flash Cache for the OLTP databases. The "offloading" capabilities provide the biggest performance gains for Reporting such as smart scans and storage indexes. There is a new security feature which allows disabling ssh to the storage servers which will make my security folks very happy. Also, there is a STIG script for hardening storage servers and Database Nodes which can be implemented as a report only or actually implement security settings. Would advise running report first to assess the results and then manually modify, as needed.

My biggest gripe has been patches which has dramatically improved since our initial Exadata was delivered (January 2011). The only issues we periodically experience are with non-default RPMs on the database nodes. These may fail during the pre-req check which means opening a SR with support. This has become the exception, not the norm so overall not much to complain about. The X2-2 used to experience frequent disk failures but now, that is a thing of the past. 

ten years

There is redundancy built throughout the Exadata so even when we've experienced a disk failure, it's a very low stress situation. Early on we had some performance issues with DBFS and a node eviction problem. DBFS was resolved through a combination of settings changes and a quarterly patch. The node eviction was resolved through a one-off patch that eventually got rolled into a quarterly patch. I would chalk up these issues to being early adopters. We do have an occasional bug but I can't think of any that would be unique to Exadata with the database software. At least this provides some degree of comfort that Exadata is not the source of the issue.

The key for scalability is selecting the appropriate disk configuration and the proper size rack configuration. The two options are High Capacity and High Performance. If ever in doubt, always go with High Capacity. The performance difference is negligible at best, however having the extra space allows for more consolidation. That's the entire point of Exadata, to consolidate databases. We've added a few databases to the Exadata since we originally started to use the environment and there has been no performance impact. In our case, a Quarter rack was appropriate but for larger environments, this may not be enough.

Customer Service:

In terms of overall Oracle customer service, we've had good experiences on this front. Oracle has provided us access to their experts and continually check to see how things are going. Whenever an issue comes up, they treat the problem seriously. Since we support a government customer, Oracle is extra motivated to ensuring we have a successful experience. Since 2011, there have been significant improvements with support. Occasionally we do hit issues which it seemingly takes support a longer period of time to provide a patch or workaround but these namely involve additional features, not core technology so it's a matter of exhibiting patience.

Technical Support:

On the hardware side, customer service is quite good. Any disk failures get replaced in a day and with triple redundancy for disk, it's not been a concern. Software customer service has improved over the years. Early on was a little rough as I will say the software wasn't fully mature. As the product has matured, so has the software support's capability to resolve issues more quickly. We can't take advantage of ASR, however this seems like a major improvement for customer service in terms of responsiveness.

We didn't switch, we were doing a technology refresh and went with Exadata instead of building out our own Oracle RAC configuration. We previously had a combination of Dell servers, Red Had Linux OS, Oracle Cluster File System on EMC Storage with Juniper switches. This configuration had lots of performance issues, node evictions, and constant headaches. Since moving to Exadata, all those pain points went away.

There is a definite learning curve initially. We had to learn about migration options, shared mount point options, how to integrate with Cloud Control, patching, health check, how to optimize, and how to harden the Exadata environment. Since we went live, many more folks use Exadata so there's more how to's and best practice documents available so the learning curve isn't nearly as steep. We learned a lot in the process and now have a tremendous amount of expertise in setting up, configuring, optimizing and maintaining the Exadata.

We implement Exadata in-house and have gone through several migration methodologies.

We had ACS perform the initial Startup Pack, however there are companies that can do this much cheaper to lower the original setup cost, such as ours. Day-to-day cost is greatly reduced compared to our legacy environment as we no longer have to serve as "fire fighters." In terms of pricing, Exadata is probably not going to be the lowest cost option. There is a price to pay for performance and stability. With that being said, I have not heard of any customers who have regretted the purchase and/or looking to get off the technology. On the contrary, I can't imagine going to another solution at this point and trying to justify this with the user community in terms of why the system performance degraded. Can't imagine that would go over too well.

We had a custom solution and evaluated Exadata versus the custom solution. Exadata was actually a cheaper solution due to the number of cores. Oracle software licenses are based on processor so if comparing a Quarter Rack versus a 4+ four node custom solution, Exadata may win out from this perspective. We were looking at a 5 node RAC which would have doubled the cost of our software licenses when compared to the equivalent with a Quarter rack of Exadata. Besides, the performance metrics indicated Exadata would easily outperform the custom solution which made our decision a no brainer.

Exadata is a powerful solution. As I mentioned there is a learning curve. Working with a company that has experience with Exadata can help avoid potential pain points and maximize the ROI.

My company uses Oracle Exadata for operational databases. It's for implementing pension, security, and life insurance.

My company is data-heavy. It's a data-oriented company, and Oracle Exadata enables it to perform many calculations and data processing in real time, which would otherwise be difficult.

What I found most valuable in Oracle Exadata is its newer technology that gives better performance. It has more recent hardware and significant changes in the architecture, so it's better than older solutions.

I'm satisfied with Oracle Exadata because it now has ten out of ten memory, which makes its overall performance much better than previous versions.

Oracle Exadata has room for improvement in pricing, especially for smaller companies. The solution is okay for bigger companies, but for smaller companies, it isn't because it adds higher than usual extra hardware costs. If Oracle wants to reach more small-scale businesses, it should improve on Oracle Exadata pricing.

We've been using Oracle Exadata for ten years.

The stability of Oracle Exadata is excellent. I don't hear complaints about its stability, so it's a nine out of ten.

This new version of Oracle Exadata has improved scalability, which I find incredible. Its scalability is nine out of ten.

My company uses advanced Oracle Exadata technical support. The support is excellent, so I'd rate it as nine out of ten. It's a long-term cooperation where my team knows the experts by name, and the support team is always available for my company. The service is excellent.

Positive

Ten years ago, my company migrated from IBM Db2 to Oracle Exadata because, upon calculation, Oracle Exadata is more beneficial from an economic point of view than IBM Db2.

My company was on some mainframe legacy software and IBM Db2, and it had many problems, so it decided to switch to Oracle Exadata. That was more of a platform-related migration than a database-related migration. My company made the right decision to move to Oracle Exadata.

The initial setup for Oracle Exadata was quite complex, so it's a six out of ten for me.

Deploying Oracle Exadata took several hours. I organized it in advance, so I was well prepared for it. I had to migrate from the previous hardware to the new hardware or appliance, and the organization in both databases was different, so the task could have been more straightforward. You need to know what you're doing to deploy Oracle Exadata successfully.

I deployed Oracle Exadata with the help of company experts and Oracle experts. It would be best to have Oracle experts for more delicate maintenance tasks or upgrades.

There's ROI from Oracle Exadata. My company saves one hundred percent using Oracle Exadata versus Oracle database licensed on different hardware.

It also depends on what you compare. My company uses Oracle solutions, so the Oracle database has many advantages for my company. For example, the company has a no-code generator software that uses the Oracle database, so the Oracle database is an essential part of the environment.

Comparing Oracle Exadata against non-Exadata, using Oracle Exadata is wiser for my company because it's cheaper to have Oracle Exadata than not because the company has to buy additional licenses and courses, which would be more expensive.

Oracle Exadata is costly. Its licensing should also be more versatile. Smaller companies would benefit if Oracle Exadata had lower pricing.

Pricing for a solution should be justified, so you must make several calculations to evaluate the price correctly. Oracle Exadata adds costs on the hardware which you wouldn't otherwise have. Still, when you go with the solution, it offloads some of the database processing on the processors, so you don't need a license for database use, and it uploads it to store sales. It means that when you do data processing intensively, or you're processing large data sets, the database will be offloaded to the storage CPU, which means that Oracle Exadata gives you free database processing, so at some point, Oracle Exadata becomes cheaper versus licensing the database and running it on your server or in the cloud.

This is when you need to carefully calculate and see if Oracle Exadata is the right choice for your company. I wouldn't give it a very high rating in terms of affordability, but it still depends. For my company, for example, it's cheaper to use Oracle Exadata than use Oracle database without Oracle Exadata. It depends on the customer. It's up to you to calculate. I'd give the solution a five out of ten for affordability because it's not cheap.

My company pays for Oracle Exadata licenses according to need. For example, my company uses a real-time cluster and has possible configurations that require licensing for the database, though that's quite modest. My company isn't huge, so the environment isn't large.

My company uses the latest version of Oracle Exadata.

Maintaining Oracle Exadata requires one main DBA involved with the maintenance, and one backup, where the backup takes care of limited tasks involving storage, network, etc. My company also works with an on-call service as needed. It's not a continuous service or a service you use regularly. My company only calls when it's necessary. For example, if there's an event or incident in the production environment or a major maintenance task, such as an Oracle Exadata upgrade. My company also has some people involved when there's a change in the environment, or it needs help with the infrastructure.

Internally, my company has around one thousand Oracle Exadata users, but externally, that number is more than one hundred thousand. There's no plan to increase its usage because the company has slow internal growth, but the growth rate is average externally. All people within my company use Oracle Exadata.

My rating for Oracle Exadata is nine out of ten, though it would still depend on the customer. Some customers may not need the solution for their environment, but for me, I'd rate it a nine.

My company is an Oracle Exadata customer.

The separation between the database nodes and storage cells is the key feature of Exadata. The capabilities of the storage cells, the intelligence, are excellent. 

The speed is unbeatable. 

Exadata was mostly for data warehouses. However, in time with a model of powerful processors in database nodes, it's also an OLTP machine. It's very good. The latest versions offer even more performance, as they have a persistent memory and a lot of features.

The usage of the internal InfiniBand Switches is a key feature in Exadata. Everything is fast due to this separation at the database level and storage level. It's intelligently designed and has a very fast connection between all of the components of Exadata. 

We can use virtualization on Exadata. We can choose capacity on demand. There are a lot of new features that have turned up in the past two to four years. The solution is growing and becoming broader in its scope.

The improvement could be made on the hardware level as the habit in the industry is to go better and faster and larger with every iteration.

From the software point of view, management point of view, it's okay right now. However, I don't understand why Exadata has no database nodes with SPARC processors. Oracle has SPARC servers that are on RISC processors and are more powerful processors than Intel processors. They never do Exadata with such processors on the database nodes level. However, they tested and it wasn't very useful. I would like to see Exadata with RISC processors on the database nodes if it's possible.

I've been working with the solution since 2012. It's been about nine years - almost a decade. It's been a while.

You can scale the solution. You can configure it how you like and buy more cells or nodes to add to it. 

The technical support has been okay. We've been satisfied with the level of service.

The initial setup isn't too complex. However, in the present, the initial setup of Exadata isn't made by Oracle partners or the client. There is an advanced ACS department, Oracle Advanced Customer Support, that handles the implementation. In this team, there are very good specialists on Exadata. These specialists from the ACS department are the guys who will install Exadata for the first time for the client. 

It's not something very complex and something which cannot be done by others, however. Our team, for example, was installing Exadata. It's possible to be done by other teams with, of course, the appropriate competencies. The implementation sits somewhere between simple and complex. The machine is complex. We cannot set up a machine like this with more components and different components like a laptop, for example. 

There is a specialized team that handles the implementation for the client.

I don't evaluate the fees involved in using the solution. It's too big. However, it's my understanding that you need to pay for the hardware, the nodes, and the cells. That said, you can configure it however you want. You can easily buy and increase the capacity in only the nodes or only the cells if you prefer. It's worth the money you spend. The value is there.

I've looked at other options. For a data warehouse, it's a better solution. It's better than Teradata, for example, or other complex machines from the competitors. Migrating data warehouses from other infrastructures to Exadata has a good success rate. I wouldn't say that it is the better solution for an OLTP system, however, for an OLAP system, it's a better option.

We've been Oracle partners for around ten years or so. I'm a project manager, and not overly technical. 

We don't have Exadata in our company, however, we have Exadata via a client. The current company where I work is the first company in Romania to sell Exadata in Romania. There are a number of Exadata solutions sold in Romania - which is why my colleague has achieved past competencies and certification in Exadata machines. They are very good, and they are delivering the present services on Exadata. I manage the projects where they deliver services on Exadata only for the customer, not in our company.

I'd advise users to consider the solution. You pay more money on the machine, however, you pay less for the licenses. On top of that, you have enough room to put a lot of data there. You can virtualize some machines and you put items on the application level, however, I don't recommend this. 

If you already have separate machines, and you have licenses for all these machines and you want to put new hardware in place, it's better to put Exadata in place instead of a lot of other machines. That way, you can consolidate the database here and you will pay less on database software licenses.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I've been very satisfied with the product overall.

We use Oracle Exadata for transaction processing and data warehousing.

What I like best about Oracle Exadata is its good performance. It's also a very fast solution.

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've been working with Oracle Exadata for ten years.

The stability of Oracle Exadata is okay, and on a scale of one to five, I'm giving it a four.

Oracle Exadata is a very scalable solution, and I'm rating it five out of five in terms of scalability.

We're happy with Oracle Exadata support, though there's always room for improvement. In the years we've contacted them, we've reached a good balance between pricing and service. They deserve a four out of five in terms of support.

We used AIX and Db2, and currently, we're still switching our databases over to Oracle Exadata.

I wasn't involved in setting up Oracle Exadata because there's a dedicated team responsible for the setup.

The deployment process took a bit of time because my company switched gradually from other technologies to Oracle Exadata, and at the moment, some of the databases are still being moved to the solution. It's a big installation because I work for a big company.

A mix of in-house teams and vendor teams was responsible for setting up and implementing Oracle Exadata.

I have no idea about the ROI from Oracle Exadata because my team doesn't calculate it.

Oracle Exadata is not a cheap solution. Pricing is a problem for Oracle, and every client, not just my company, would like the vendor to improve on the price, or lower the price.

My company paid for several years' worth of Oracle Exadata licenses. You need to pay for the technical support and other features separately, on different contracts.

In terms of affordability, my rating for Oracle Exadata is two out of five.

Oracle Exadata is deployed on the cloud, but for databases, deployment is on-premises.

My company has twenty thousand users of applications based on Oracle Exadata. My company develops internal applications given to users, and the applications have persistent layers in Oracle.

My rating for Oracle Exadata is eight out of ten.

My company is an Oracle customer.

My advice to new users is to start small and implement Oracle Exadata incrementally. Don't implement it with a big bang approach. Do it piece by piece. The solution is good for big companies because I belong to a big company, but my company did the implementation one piece at a time.

There's a plan to increase the usage of Oracle Exadata because some of the older databases still need to be moved from Unix. Some of the databases in Db2 will also be moved to Oracle Exadata.

Oracle Exadata is our calling and banking solution that provides an emergency financial system for our process. The system also collects data from Oracle databases, which requires the manpower of qualified engineers.

According to the engineering team, and I agree, the most valuable features are the voucher, certification, and quick support. 

The problem resolution times with the solution are much higher. This information is based on our databases and our drive.

The cost of the solution is high and can be improved.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

I give the stability of the solution an eight out of ten.

To scale up with Oracle we have to purchase new infrastructure. I give the scalability a six out of ten.

We previously used Sophos for a ten-year run.

The solution is already reconfigured but not the system, only the semantics. Our network cables and the valves, the main areas such as the connectivity part, that's the network. Once they are completed and databases are accessible the configuration part has to be done. Overall the initial setup is straightforward and according to the manager's words, it's convenient to be able to reconfigure the system on the solution.

The ease of setup is an eight out of ten.

The deployment is not done overnight. In order to ensure our system management has little impact on the business area, the deployment is done in stages. Bringing on a new version update would only take a few days to test and test the environment. We have to verify and extract some information in order to improve the environment. Once all the testing is complete, we can move into the live environment. Full deployment will take one and a half to two months.

I give the pricing of the solution a five out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

When it comes to Oracle, I think it's a good investment. I know it's not cheap, but they offer excellent service and support. They are always looking to improve and customize their services, which is why my organization continues to use Oracle.

We have 5,000 employees in the organization. More than 2,000 people use our platform daily. This means my team, supported by Oracle and our co-banking system running on Oracle, is prepared for at least 2,000 people to use the solution daily.

New users should have the proper technical knowledge of the operator and that only requires having the right tools and contacting Oracle for support. Another important factor is the company's aftersales support. This ensures that we will be able to get the necessary care and service we need in order to keep our solution running smoothly. Plus, it's always good to have a company we can count on for renewing our solution the following year.

Basically, we simply use the solution to store our own database. We run more than 135 applications in our bank and we use Oracle to hold the data.

The solution is extremely stable. That's one of the main reasons we are using it.

The product is flexible.

It's a fairly easy-to-use solution.

The solution scales quite well and always meets our needs when we need to extend it.

The product is very easy to install.

Technical support is quite good.

The solution could always be more stable and more reliable. The more they work on this, the better the product will be. That said, for the most part, right now, it's pretty good.

I've been using the solution for two years. It hasn't been that long just yet.

The stability has been very good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance has been great.

The solution offers excellent scalability. It's one of its great selling features. We never have to worry about it not having enough capacity for our needs.

Currently, we have about 8,000 end-users on this product.

Currently, we're quite happy with Oracle's technical support, If we weren't we would definitely let them know. However, at this time, they are helpful and responsive.

The initial implementation is quite simple and straightforward. It's not difficult or too complex for someone to handle. A company should have no trouble with the setup process. 

For us, the deployment process took around three days. That was just to have all of the planning and other stuff in line and ready to go. Everything all together - including the migration, et cetera, should be three to five days, or something in that ballpark.

We have about 35 people in IT that can handle any maintenance tasks required.

For the initial setup, we do have an integrator. There are three parties involved with the implementation process. There's Oracle, then the distributor, and finally, the party that was contracted for implementation.

We are under contract and pay a license to Oracle. I cannot speak to the exact amount.

We've mostly been using Oracle for our systems, however, we do use MySQL for our verification. 

We're customers and end-users of Oracle.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number, however. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've mostly been quite happy with its overall capabilities. I'd recommend the product to other users and companies.

We use Oracle Exadata to provide data for our analytics in our BI systems. It can be, BI, Tableau, or batch queries. It's a Russian system called 1C and we developed ETL procedures for Oracle Exadata. We don't use any ETL instruments. We only made some packages and control mechanisms that provide us to upload data into the aggregate tables and other usages.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the smart scan. We have large TB sessions of approximately 100 per second for each of our three instances. The smart scan allows us the obtain data in time in the enterprise manager.

The solution overall is a complete system.

Oracle Exadata could improve the monitoring system in the enterprise manager, it could be more user-friendly. In most Oracle tools there is a lot of functionality, and sometimes you need to do five or six clicks to find metrics, and sometimes it's a waste of time.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately four years.

Oracle Exadata is the most stable system I have used. The performance is very good.

Oracle Exadata is highly scalable. To scale the solution you contact Oracle for the scalability you want, they give you the details, and you set it up.

We have more than 100 people using this solution in my company.

We do not plan to increase our usage because here in Russia we have some restrictions and we will have to move on without it.

We have used the support from Oracle and it is very good.

I rate the support from Oracle Exadata a five out of five.

Positive

I have used other solutions, such as PostgreSQL, Amazon, and Microsoft. The features that Oracle Exadata has these other solutions do not, such as smart scan or monitoring. If we were to have the same performance as Oracle Exadata, we would have to have more hardware.

The initial setup of Oracle Exadata is very complex. It has steps that need someone with qualifications to be completed.

The price of Oracle Exadata is competitive. There are some features that are outside of the initial purchase license, such as some monitoring packages.

I rate the price of Oracle Exadata a four out of five.

We have DBA administrators that do the maintenance of this solution.

My advice to others is to take courses in Oracle database, Oracle Exadata administration, and other development guides. They need to know how to use the solution before they start.

I rate Oracle Exadata a nine out of ten.

Oracle Exadata is a flash disk, so my company's primary use case is achieving target performance on the database level.

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.

Oracle Exadata is one of the best products of Oracle, with the best engineering.

One small area for improvement in Oracle Exadata is integration, particularly at the consolidated application level.

Additional features I would like to see in Oracle Exadata in its next version include a cloud interface and GUI.

I have around one year of experience with Oracle Exadata, and I'm still working with it.

Oracle Exadata is a nine on a scale of one to ten, stability-wise.

Oracle Exadata scalability is a nine out of ten.

The initial setup for Oracle Exadata is straightforward and user-friendly because it has a great feature called OneCommand, which makes installation automated.

Both in-house and vendor teams implemented Oracle Exadata.

I'm giving Oracle Exadata five out of ten in terms of pricing. Its price could be lower.

Compared to other solutions, Oracle Exadata is more valuable because it has excellent features and it's a one-box solution.

I've worked with different versions of Oracle Exadata, such as X7, X8, and X9.

My customers use Oracle PCA (Private Cloud Appliance) for Oracle Exadata deployment. Banks use a private cloud, not a public cloud.

My company is a platinum partner of Oracle, with sixty to seventy customers using Oracle Exadata. In terms of maintenance, forty to fifty technical staff handle the maintenance for all customers.

My company is an Oracle vendor working with customers on implementation and deployment projects. The company is a reseller of Oracle Exadata.

I'm rating Oracle Exadata as eight out of ten.