Oracle Exadata Reviews

The best features are its robustness, stability, and performance.

Actually, I'm using the old version. The latest version is already out with all a lot of new features; so what I’m looking for is already there in that. Once we start using the new one, then we can come to know what additions we can put in.

It seems very stable.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is awesome. Oracle is our technical support; so when we need it, they are there.

Initial setup is complex. You need Oracle technical support to do your initial setup.

I would certainly say if you're looking for something scalable or diverse, this is the solution.

The most valuable feature is supposed to be speed. I like the consolidation with the memory, the SSD and the InfiniBand, and the algorithms that they use internally to take different paths through for the database traffic. All of those features are why we went with it.

We've just started to convert over and the performance out of it was not as much as we had expected. We're seeing only, probably, one-third faster than where we were at. I don't know if we'll get the benefit that we had anticipated out of it.

I think their platinum support needs to be improved. It's very difficult after you've got the product in-house. They’ve got great service up until you get the product. Then, you get the product, and trying to find someone to help you with configuration or setup, or even just opening up an SR, was not there.

With patching, it takes 6-8 weeks to get it onto their schedule, in order to get something patched. Then, it's rush, rush, rush at the very end. It's a big mystery as to what exactly are they doing. That's the biggest problem that we've had.

We have not had any down time. We've run into bugs, which we had not anticipated. When we upgraded software, depending on the version, if you're not with the current patch release, you have huge problems. You can't even run. We can't even run our application right now because we ran into a patch problem.

For as far as we've gotten with it, it has scaled to our needs; so far so good.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. This was a CIO decision and we went with Exadata.

You want to get everything set up before it comes in the door. While you still have that sales support with you, you want to get all of your additional support, because you have to be added in for the platinum support area. Get all of that set up before you get your product in.

It's not as good as we expected, but it's definitely better than what I've seen with other companies.

The most valuable feature is definitely the storage offload; the fact that, as you're executing your SQL, it's segregated out to a storage device, and the database itself doesn't have to take that overhead. We've noticed a huge improvement in execution.

It has definitely improved my organization, because it's an engineered solution. It's not pieces and parts from different vendors. Having the one-vendor solution that's fully supported by Oracle, it doesn't require us to have the number of staff that it used to in a more distributed environment. We've definitely got some efficiencies from a staffing model because of it.

I'd like to see them improve more of the reporting capabilities of Enterprise Manager for the Exadata plug-in.

It's definitely been stable for us; over a four-year period, we had zero outages. It's been rock solid.

We’ve had experience scaling it. We started out originally with an X2, the second release of Exadata. A year ago, we expanded that with the new X5. We were able to take our existing procurement and expand it with newer hardware too.

We definitely have noticed that technical support has gone down, unfortunately. The quality of support; it takes a lot longer to get tickets resolved than it did four years ago, when we first bought the Exadata. We're an engineered systems customer. That's supposed to have more platinum-level support model to it. We have not experienced that recently.

It was end of life for our previous hardware. We had to buy something. The Exadata just seemed to be a better solution.

Initial setup was very simple, actually. Getting all of the right network information was really the critical path for it, but once that was done, the actual install and configuration was very simple.

The replacement hardware was ironically Sun. Because Oracle procured Sun, they just became our natural progression.

When I’m choosing a vendor to work with, I look at the reliability of the actual hardware solution itself and then also the support. Even though tech support has not been very good for us, our Oracle reps have stayed with us and want us to be successful. They help us try and navigate the Oracle waters.

Know what versions of hardware are out there, for any type of an engineered solution. Understand where there might not be redundancy in the solution, to know if that's going to meet your needs or not.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I probably wouldn't give anyone a perfect rating. It's met all of our expectations.

The most valuable feature of the overall system is the way it is engineered. It basically gives you the best performance. The most important thing that you will see in the database, especially an Oracle database, is the latency because of IO. Because of the built-in flash, the latency is really reduced quite drastically.

We do see very good performance, at least 30% better performance in our overall response time when we use Exadata.

It's very specialized hardware. It really meets very critical needs, but it is very expensive. When I was working for another company, which was a mid-sized company, they did not even consider Exadata just because of cost. Making it more cost effective might help them.

Other than that, from a technical point of view, I can't think of any area with room for improvement.

I have been using it for one year.

I believe it's a stable solution because we haven't seen any issues, so far.

It is scalable, given the way you can add more and more Exadata to your configuration, but it gets expensive. However, I'm not the right person to comment on whether it provides enough value for the money.

I don't know too much about their support because I'm not the person who directly interacts with Oracle support on any issues. Nonetheless, one thing I learned is, for any maintenance, we have to call an Oracle technician. That's in our contract and that gets expensive. For small and mid-sized companies, that might be a factor they might want to consider.

If they are really looking for performance, and performance is the only thing that matters to them, while having a very stable system, this product is engineered within Oracle, who knows their database more than anyone else. A combination of hardware and software from the same vendor, it is specifically designed for Oracle Database, so I definitely recommend it, if it meets all their other cost and other requirements.

The most valuable features are the high columnar compression and the flash cache. Basically, the whole I/O subsystem is valuable, but those two features are really big for us.

Pricing.

I have been using it for close to five years.

It is very stable. We were on X2; that was not as stable. There were some battery issues with some of the flash cache cards. We're on X5 and X4 now and that's much better; many more IOPS, so that's been great.

It is scalable, very much so. It will absolutely meet the company's needs going forward.

The support for troubleshooting issues is OK; it's fine.

The support for patching – we have Platinum Support – is probably one of the worst I have ever experienced in my career. We've been trying to upgrade to the latest version of 11g R2 and we haven't done it. The last few times we've tried to do it, they were supposed to be able to upgrade without downtime, but the last two or three times, we've had downtime. We have very little trust in Platinum Support to do the upgrades.

Previously, we just used regular Oracle databases on standard hardware. Now, most of our products are on their own silo databases. Now, we're pushing them all to a single Exadata, using Exadata solutions.

We actually contracted the initial setup out, as part of Oracle Platinum Support. We also have another third-party company that did more of the operations on it. When my team finally got to it, everything was set up. It's really a matter of deploying our application on there and then tuning it to be more Exadata specific; not a whole lot. Anything will run on it, but we take advantage of the high columnar compression and the flash cache storage.

As far as cost goes, it's really expensive. The huge price tag on it is the only reason why I have not given it a perfect rating.

If you have the money, spend it; if it makes sense, obviously. If you're really I/O bound, it's a great solution; I/O bound from performance to storage. With the high columnar compression, we're getting close to 10X compression.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle to work with, I look for one with a good reputation and is reliable. Reputation comes on as willingness to work with you. I consider the features that are offered; is what they're offering now going to scale, obviously? Is what they're offering now going to still be supported in the future? There are compatibility issues and similar items. For example, with Exadata, I'd hate to be the one of only three companies on Exadata in the world and five years from now, nobody remembers what Exadata is.

One of its most valuable features is the ease of managing infrastructure as a whole; software and hardware coming together in one place to manage all the architecture, networking, hardware, software, storage, etc.

Every year, there is definitely some incremental improvement; faster storage, more compute nodes, better networking, etc. At some point, regarding the whole computation model, instead of just having more and more CPUs, the core itself probably needs to get smarter. Instead of saying, “Oh, it's 16 cores. Now, it's 32. Now, it's 64.”, I would like to see the 16 cores able to do smarter work. That's what I think. I can see it's kind of heading that way, so we might get some improvement in that space.

I have been using it for a little bit over three years.

It's stable. We haven't had any, what I would call Sev 1-type, issues that have caused us a problem with Exadata.

It is a scalable solution. I think it's going to meet the company's needs moving forward, without problems.

Between 1 and 10, technical support is 7 or 8. Time to time, we do run into some issues, here and there, where it takes us a little while to get through, to make sure that engineers understand what's going on. For the most part, we don't have any major hiccups, I guess. Sometimes, the issue is finding the right person, getting to the right person to have that conversation. Once you have that then it's fine, but getting to it takes a little bit of time.

We previously just had commodity servers that we replaced with Exadata for the ease of convenience.

The initial infrastructure setup is straightforward because it is delivered in a box. It's all pre-configured for the most part. Again, I think it boils down to how each company does it after it's deployed at their site. That's where it gets a little bit challenging and that's where you have to put a little bit of effort in to make sure you lay it down right.

I would definitely recommend Exadata to someone in a similar job role as myself at a similar-sized company, but I would also them to understand the need of what they’re trying to do and not necessarily go to Exadata just because it's nice. They need to spend time on what they want to get out of it. Yes, it's a nicely engineered system but they also need to evaluate cost versus benefit. It's not cheap, I can tell you that.

Its most valuable feature is the smart scan functionality. It allows for the queries to work faster. It offloads the stuff to the cell server, so it provides better performance.

I like the consolidation of all the components in one feature. I like the fact that it's very specialized and you can go ahead and utilize it, out of the box. It is intuitively different than a normal database solution; you have to actually design for it. For example, you get rid of indexes instead of creating them. It's a little different; you really need to get up to speed on what the functionality is in order to optimize it. There are a few different things that you can use, such as compression; you can use all kinds of different features that it has.

A lot of the extra features they're adding are wonderful, but they're always putting a price on it, for example, the in-memory thing. For certain things, such as Exadata, we're going to stay with on-premises because of regulations. It feels like for anything new, it's almost like they want another license fee; that's the down side.

Maybe they could make the licensing not so bad. If you're already buying something that costs a quarter of a million dollars up to a half a million dollars, maybe they could throw in some extra bang for the buck, some freebies.

It is hardware; things break. It does have some redundancy in it, you will see a performance hit at certain periods of time, but I do like the fact that it does have a lot of failover.

The scalability is a little bit difficult, actually. A lot of people advertise it as being easy, but what happens is: when you have a previous version and you want to scale that version, they're already into a new version. It's almost better just to buy the new X6 instead of trying to expand your X3. If you want to do scalability, you have to do it immediately within a year; you can't wait.

Actually, level one support is OK. It's no different than what most DBAs themselves can handle. Right now, we have a challenge with some wrong results on Exadata, and it's taking a number of weeks; we have clients that are very upset. I would say technical support is a mix. It depends on how difficult the question is, and if it was encountered before. If it was encountered before, really fast. If not, you have to go to development and it can take a while.

We did not previously use a different solution. It's a data warehousing product. I know you can use it for online transaction processing, but it's perfectly wonderful for data warehousing. It has a tremendous increase in performance; it's like night and day. We still have some people that are on old systems that we're moving and it's like night and day. You can put really lousy code on it and make that code run good. I'm not saying the code was lousy; I'm just saying that Exadata handles the code differently. If you know how to optimize it, you have to optimize it, though. If you try to put the old code on, don't make your indexes invisible and don't understand how it works, you can actually cause a degradation in performance. You need someone on staff or Oracle help with the understanding of what the differences are, so that you can really make it work for you.

I have a huge background in UNIX hardware, networking and database. For me, it was extremely straightforward. For someone who has just one job function, for example, just a DBA, it would be very challenging. I work with some people for whom it is extremely challenging because they don't have the other aspects; they only understand database and that's a problem if you want to work in Exadata.

In the past, we were looking at EMC solutions; the flash, the different disks and so on. It still wasn't able or capable to function the way that the Exadata does. That's why Exadata won out, but Exadata could probably improve itself by using some of that state-of-the-art flash in the product more. They could even improve on the design by using more up-to-date disks and technologies, that are out there now.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle the most important criteria for me are reputation, stability, performance; that kind of criteria.

If a friend asked me about Exadata, I would encourage them to go with it.

It is fast and integrated. It combines hardware with the software that we use from Oracle. It's a complete stack, not only for the hardware but the full implementation and delivery, so it’s really good for IT.

We have seen performance and reliability benefits. It's also beneficial from a cost perspective.

We are using it now predominantly as a hardware stack managed by our company. We would love to see it more as a service; a database-as-a-service offering.

It is very stable; no stability issues.

No problems with scalability.

The SRs that we raise are not always resolved in a timely fashion. Often I'm unhappy.

At this moment in time, it is pretty much a straightforward, almost-manual installation. We're looking for some automation around it.

We also looked at other organizations or vendors, as well. We also looked at the database appliance from Oracle.

We decided to go with the Exadata product because of the size of our company.

The Nike one: Just do it.