Oracle Exadata Reviews

I primarily use Exadata to handle the databases of critical applications.

Exadata's best features are its performance during redo logging and the elasticity of the database handling.

Exadata would be improved with single dashboard visibility.

I've been working with Exadata for six to seven years.

Exadata is stable.

Exadata is scalable.

The initial installation took around a week.

I would recommend Exadata to other users for its database management and would rate it eight out of ten.

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.

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.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for a data warehouse using only a Linux environment.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the integration with other solutions, such as SAN storage and shared VLAN network.

Oracle Exadata could improve by decreasing the price.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately six years.

The Oracle Exadata environment design is very reliable. I have not had any issues with the solution on the cloud or on-premise.

Oracle Exadata is highly scalable. You can increase the network and everything works well.

We have approximately 10 clients using the solution in the finance sector.

The support from Oracle Exadata is good.

The initial setup of Oracle Exadata is done by well-trained engineers. I have to prepare the environment with all the systems, active environments, and IoT networks. After the preparation, the engineers can do the scripting. Once installed from the scripts we can work with it.

The whole implementation process can take between two and three hours.

We used the support from Oracle Exadata to complete the implementation.

Mainly all the patching and updates are handled directly by the Oracle support team.

The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate Oracle Exadata a seven out of ten.

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.

We do use it in conjunction with Hadoop due to limitations. We have around 50 users supported by this solution. All sources of required data from various sources and systems are prepared in Oracle Exadata. We write down the SQL queries and take the required output from the Oracle Exadata database. Tableau is connected to the Oracle Exadata database and we complete all analysis, reports and visualization using Tableau. Overall, this is a good solution.

We have used this solution for a long period of time so it has become easy for us to query any kind of data from Oracle Exadata which has been valuable. 

We have experienced some issues with processing unstructured data on Exadata. This is an important requirement for our AIML based use case. Reactive analytics data can not be prepared easily in Oracle Exadata.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use Oracle Exadata for Oracle databases.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately five years.

Oracle Exadata is stable.

I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory.

Everyone in the organization is using the solution in my organization.

The technical support is good, we have not had a problem.

The initial installation is not difficult, it took two to three days to complete.

We used an integrator for the implementation of Oracle Exadata. We have qualified integrators in Morocco.

We have a few engineers and administrators doing the maintenance and support of the solution.

You have to pay for the storage and the database in Oracle Exadata. It cost a lot, but it is worth it. It would be a benefit if we could reduce the price for the number of CPUs and extend the memory.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Oracle Exadata a ten out of ten.

Oracle Exadata is used to keep our data, which is related to the company. It collects it from the source system and stores it in the enterprise data warehouse platform. For storing the data itself and serving the data on a different platform for the company.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is its capabilities for storing and processing data. It is very good for our domain. 

The solution only requires one person for maintenance and support in an average-sized insurance company.

Oracle Exadata could improve the platform performance tuning should be easier, automated, and user-friendly.

In a future release, I would like to have new analytical capabilities.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for more than eight years.

The stability of Oracle Exadata is good.

Oracle Exadata is scalable.

We have data engineers and data scientists using this platform, and in my team, there are 25 of them, and all of them are using this platform.

We request a heath check for issues from the support and we have a deal with them to support us.

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

Oracle Exadata's initial setup is easy. Installing the solution on our system in the data center takes less than one day.

I would rate the initial setup of Oracle Exadata a four out of five.

We did the implementation using our team and a third-party company.

There is an annual license to use this solution. The solution is expensive.

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

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.