Oracle Exadata Reviews

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.

It provides performance for our highly critical applications.

They seem to be doing real well with keeping up on the performance and everything, especially what I have seen with the new chipset that is being offered. I can't really think of anything that they are not doing that they should be doing.

It can be difficult to patch and maintain because there are so many databases running on it.

We have been using Exadata for about five years.

We have had no down time with it, but it can be difficult to patch and maintain because there are so many databases running on it.

It is an absolutely scalable solution.

The support is very good.

I'm not involved in operations that much, but from what I understand, they get back to us; they always find the right person.

Oracle comes in and does the initial setup.

I recommend it for highly critical, performance-sensitive applications. You have to do a TCO on it because it is a fairly expensive solution. There has to be a cost-benefit analysis done on that.

Oracle Exadata provides very good performance and reliability. It's a highly reliable system and provides maximum performance.

The business outcomes are much faster; end users are very happy so they can focus on their day-to-day work rather than waiting for the computer, the response from the system. In many customer cases, reports that used to take 10-12 hours get completed in 1-2 hours, a massive reduction. A business cycle that used to take about 3-5 days to turn around can be turned around in 1 day, so that's where we optimize our business utilization; much more efficiency.

A major concern from customers is that it's very costly, but if they think about the total cost of ownership over 3-5 years, I think the total cost attests to the business readiness and it doesn't come out to be very costly.

Exadata is pretty stable. There are built-in high-availability features. For example, every component – including the power supply, the fan, the CPU, and the memory – is redundant; you're buying a highly available system.

It absolutely scales to our customers’ needs. You can start with a two-node configuration, and you can go as high as eight racks, I believe, connected together with eight nodes, so you can scale up to 64. That number might have changed recently. You can scale it very well.

Technical support is fantastic. Oracle supports Exadata customers as the top tier, and you get support when you need it. Oracle has separate Exadata support. Once you buy Exadata, you go to that dedicated team and the turnaround is very, very good.

Initial setup is complicated and you need to engage Oracle to do that. Obviously, nobody else can do that. It's complicated, but it's a part of the process.

It's a very good product. I think if you have a business use and can justify the cost, go and buy it. You'll never regret it.

The system is engineered to run both databases and enterprise applications unlike other engineered systems, which are either tailored only for databases or only for applications. The ability to consolidate all of the databases is a big plus.

The SuperCluster provides best of both worlds – Oracle Exadata functionality along with virtualization at the firmware and the OS kernel layers.

On the Exadata side the features most valuable are – Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) for both Data Warehouse and OLTP workloads, Storage Indexes for Smart Scan, ability to use Flash Cache for DB storage, and more.

With SuperCluster and Exadata, all of the servers and storage are integrated within the same rack. This reduces the configuration and setup time, increases performance, and makes maintenance and patching easy. We are able to consolidate all of the databases and application stack on a single SuperCluster with Exadata.

In the area of Solaris zone-level virtualization, it would be good to have memory capping as a tool for memory management. Currently for 11g databases running on Exadata with smart scan against hybrid columnar compressed (HCC), tables could result in errors. It would be nice to have a patch rather than the current solution of upgrading the databases to 12c.

Currently, we have a Half-Rack SuperCluster with 2 SPARC T5-8 Compute Nodes and 4 Exadata Storage Servers. Current version of Exadata is 12.1.2.1.3. The compute nodes are running Solaris 11.2 with Oracle11g 11.2.0.4 databases. We've been using it for close to three years.

We had few issues while deploying DB zones. This virtualization has to be carried out differently when compared to DB LDOM virtualization.

There have been no major problems so far with stability.

There have been no major problems so far with scalability.

Overall it has been good so far.

Overall it has been good so far. In the case of engineered systems like SuperCluster/Exadata, the patching has to go through the support team and there is definitely room for improvements in this area.

Previously, we had multiple servers both with and without physical partitioning. The storage for all of the servers had to be zoned to a SAN. The servers and the storage previously were from different vendors and we had to integrate those. Other product offerings were evaluated, but with all of those we had to explicitly integrate the compute, storage, and networking components. In addition, we could not get the benefits of database optimizations with Exadata and have to pay the penalty for virtualization overhead and network traffic between compute and storage layers.

There is a certain degree of complexity with respect to the initial design of the Exadata storage cell disks and grid disks to meet the customer’s application needs. This especially true when migrating from an existing setup. Care has to be taken with regard to the initial domain configurations since this will determine the LDOM and zone-level virtualization. The Exadata disks have to be exposed to both the DB LDOMS and DB Zones.

The initial setup was from the vendor team (for any engineered systems from Oracle). But later we had to continue the setup to cater to our application and business needs. Prior to the implementation, all of the IP allocations are to be completed for the three layers – Client/Public network, InfiniBand private network, and the Management network.

At this time, I do not have the actual numbers but would rate the ROI is pretty good.

In the long run one can consolidate the various DB related licenses. The number of cores required to run the DBs and applications is much lower on a SuperCluster with Exadata, thereby leading to fewer licenses and reduced cost. Since the entire stack is owned by one vendor (in this case Oracle) the core factor for licensing is 0.5 leading to fewer licenses for the software components.

The SuperCluster in addition to Exadata storage also comes with ZFS storage cluster. Since the compute nodes, storage and networking components are fully integrated with InfiniBand I/O fabric this provides very high performance between various components. Also, it has built-in hardware encryption to provide data security.

The following features of Exadata are the most valuable to me:

• Cell offloading
• Smart Scan
• Flash Cache
• Infiniband Fabric
• IO Resource Manager
• Hybrid Columnar Compression
• Storage Indexes

The Exadata database machine is a perfect solution to cater to the needs of large data warehouses. It aptly addresses the problems of database consolidation and marks an end to the argument of running mixed workloads together. With Exadata, we were not only able to consolidate our large data warehouses in a single machine, but we also stabilized the peak workloads. The throughput issues simply vanished with the features like Flash Cache and Infiniband Network Fabric.

On the operational fronts, Exadata streamlines the tasks and responsibilities in a distinctive manner across the levels of an enterprise IT structure. Solution architects act as machine administrators and make sure that the machine is being used in optimal way. At the same time, database administrators, being the familiar heads, don't find much change in roles. Overall, Exadata justifies the total cost of ownership (TCO) by balancing the capital and operational expenses - thereby achieving a higher ROI.

Starting from Exadata X5, virtualization is supported. The feature, though, for some reason, is not much talked about. If Oracle starts promoting OVM and VMWare on Exadata through white papers and case studies, I'm sure it will enable new IT setups in practice. For instance, virtualization support can enable ETL nodes to be resident with Exadata.

I have been using this solution since 2012 (four years).

I did not encounter any issues with deployment.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues either.

I rate customer service 8/10.

I rate it 8/10. My experience with Oracle Support has been moderate. Many times, I find support engineers working on an SR seem to be in a hurry to change the status to 'customer working'. In the past, I've asked them to understand the issue over a call (rather than adding updates) and then suggest the solution.

A vendor team with good expertise implemented the solution.

Find the appropriate workload for the machine. Looking at the data sheet, Exadata is a beast meant to solve bigger problems. You will not be able to gauge its benefits with nuggets of data.

Oracle Engineered Systems are the best solution for Oracle and non-Oracle applications: hardware and software are combined together to ensure high availability and maximum performance. Oracle Exadata contains all the advantages of standard Oracle Database, but on top of that there are exclusive features such as IORM (IO Resource Manager) and HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression). IORM (in combination with Database Resource Manager (DBRM)) permits you to isolate I/O requests to avoid I/O saturation. HCC provides different levels of compression to reduce space allocation and to decrease I/O.

Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are standard-based. Customers can easily migrate their existing applications based on Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic: they can take advantages of Engineered Systems with minimal effort during the migration process. Customers can benefit from high performance without modifying Java or SQL code and they can decide to use specific features after migrating to Exadata/Exalogic. Also, Engineered Systems can be used to consolidate complex environments: for example, our customer was able to decommission about 20 blades, using a single 1/8 Exalogic x4-2. Finally, Exadata and Exalogic simplifies patching/upgrading process, unifying firmware upgrades, ILOM upgrades, OS patching, Database/WebLogic upgrade/patching in one "single-vendor" activity.

We installed the first Exadata in 2011.

The most critical issue was due to a bug with SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol): after connecting Exalogic and Exadata to the same Infiniband fabric and after enabling SDP listeners on Exadata compute nodes, we faced unexpected and random crashes of database hosts. Fortunately, we discovered that SDP caused the reboot, so we disabled it. We permanently resolved the issue with the latest firmware of Exadata, and after that we can take advantage in terms of performance, of SDP protocol.

We used to perform upgrades of Exadata from quarter to half in order to increase CPU/storage capacity. When Exadata hardware is too old (for example, if you want to upgrade from Exadata X3-2 quarter to half, adding x6-2 hardware), you should evaluate the possibility of installing a new Exadata and using Oracle Data Guard to move Oracle Databases.

6/10

There was no solution in place previously.

Using Exadata and Exalogic, you can get the best performance optimizing the number of CPUs, saving costs on software licensing. Also, if you consolidate your environment using Engineered Systems, you can save money on hardware (storage/compute capacity).

No other options were looked at.

As best practice, before starting the installation you should have a look at the Oracle Documentation. Oracle provides a "Getting Started Guide" to get up-to-date checklists to verify requirements (for example IP addresses, name syntax, etc.) and to be sure your infrastructure is ready for the installation. Also, we recommend to install Oracle Enterprise Manager as a monitoring solution: it is fully integrated with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, you can monitor hardware (compute nodes, switches, ILKOM etc.) and software (operating system, Database, WebLogic, business applications etc.).

The place where I've used it are mainly on the data warehouses with larger implementations, and having everything in one enclosure is really a lot nicer. Having the disk, all the memory, and all the networking, makes not just the implementation easier, but as you're running it, a lot simpler to administer. Because we're asking it to handle everything, it's a simple solution to administer and support. It also has plugins that makes it easier to monitor.

Definitely having the ability to have one machine do everything has been the biggest improvement for us organizationally. From the administration side, it helps. If one or two admins can handle it, they don't have to go all over the place to, such as to the storage team, the network team, or anywhere else because they can do a lot of things internally. Definitely, we've seen cost, time, and HR savings with several implementations.

Sometimes pricing can be a bit of an issue, especially if customers don't know exactly what they're getting. Maybe they've gone through the whole process and they didn't get the right size or the right amount. I've worked with several customers who had implementations that were too small and then had to upgrade, as well with others who were overpowered with their implementations.

The deployments have been issue-free.

We haven't really had any stability issues. The experiences we have had were when there have been hardware failures, but a Oracle took care of that pretty quickly. Our customer had databases and memory modules die and everything kept running. With the failures we've seen, it's stayed very consistent on the ones we've done.

If it's done with the right specs in mind, it seems to scale pretty well. We haven't really had any scalability issues.

Exadata is pretty much set up when it ships. Afterwards, you just have to copy data over and it's ready to go. So the setup is fairly easy and straightforward.

Definitely do a POC on it. Work closely with Oracle Professional Services to help you with the right configurations.