Oracle Exadata Reviews

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 sell hyper-converged infrastructure tools including Oracle Exadata to enterprise customers such as governments. These are large projects that handle big data and typically run into the range of several million dollars, and in 2016, we had our first big Exadata project which involved implementing two superclusters with Exadata and Exalogic together. 

In some processes, we use converged infrastructure tools, but it's far more common nowadays to go with hyper-converged infrastructure tools. On our side, we prefer hyper-converged infrastructure because there just aren't that many people using the standard convergence model anymore. We're changing our processes to work exclusively with hyper-convergence and other technologies that complement hyper-convergence.

We use Exadata and Exadata Cloud at customer sites, and the main project that we're involved in now is hyper-converged Oracle environments with Exadata. I'm studying how to best apply the hyper-convergence model in Oracle to change Exadata to VxRail. But my forecast going forward is that we will be using fifty percent hyper-converged tools with Dell VxRail, and fifty percent with Oracle Exadata.

With Oracle Exadata, the change from on-premise to cloud is becoming a reality. With this, it becomes better and easier for us to make renovations and maintain our projects. We earn money with renovations on cloud, but when it comes to on-prem, we don't earn much when the customer needs renovations and support.

Regarding features, there are so many that we can offer to customers. When we sell Exadata Cloud, there are many options to choose from, especially when it comes to enterprise database options. In my experience, the main features that are appreciated are various ones like GPS and the assortment of security options.

There is one aspect to Exadata that I dislike, and that's the inconsistency with other databases. When you try to get Exadata to function with another type of database like SQL, or others, there should be reliable and consistent operation. When this is improved on, we should start to see more applications growing the market.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for six years, more or less.

Stability is very good. Especially if you maintain it and always update, you won't have any problems with stability. Once Exadata is established, it's 100%.

My one customer was using the Exadata version from 2013 which was extremely outdated, and when they changed to the updated version of the main system application it was very healthy for the customer's company. 

I think the scalability is good, but it can be even better. With the newer editions of Exadata, they are changing some features to meet the needs of growth and scalability, like access to additional disks in the storage environment, and they've upped the memory, too. But I don't think it was central, or essential, to the Exadata offering at first.

Nowadays, it's easier. In the first years of implementation of Exadata it was a bit more difficult, but now it's easier. If you have a team that knows Exadata well, and knows the limits of Exadata, then the setup and implementation is easy. If, on the other hand, you don't have an experienced team, then it's really difficult.

The last implementation we deployed took about two weeks, more or less.

The majority of our customers are in government or big enterprises, and the projects that we sell come out to several million USD. With this amount of money on the table, it's always better to have an experienced team of consultants, who know Exadata very well, handle the implementation.

If you're interested in going with Exadata, then I highly recommend looking for an experienced consulting firm that has completed at least one large implementation before, because it isn't something you want to put in the hands of unskilled consultants. And don't forget to be careful with your implementation when it comes to GDPR in Europe.

I would rate Oracle Exadata a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for financial data purposes which runs at our warehouse.

We have had the benefit from the reduction of almost one terabyte of data from using the querying function.

The feature that allows querying the storage server is great. The solution can handle heavy workloads, always has updated features, fast response times, and many tasks are automated. Furthermore, if you want to do the consultation, instead of maintaining the multiple test systems, or multiple on-premises services, you can use virtualization and you can use it.

A few improvements can be made such as better resource optimization, virtualization where you can see the virtual machine on top of the Exadata, the ability to limit CPUs, and reduced license costs. 

We need a monitoring tool which can in one place, where we can manage, monitor the entire Exadata components. Currently, we have multiple tools for different components to check and verify but one would be a benefit.

I have been using the solution for more than eight years.

If needed you can scale it up. In terms of CPU and memory, we increased the memory and CPUs to accomplish this. You are limited from the hardware you have, increasing the performance of your hardware allows for increased scalability.

There are times when there are complicated problems and we have reached our limits and cannot solve them. This is when we have contacted the support. When this has happened, their team has been good at resolving our problems. Whenever we had these issues we worked with them and they were able to have an answer within a 12 to 24-hour time frame.

The setup was not too complicated. We followed the standards install and we didn't see any big issues. We did try a few different versions and some of the migration can be a little bit labouring but we didn't face any data challenges.

The licensing can be a bit expensive because you need to have certain tools enabled that require them.

Oracle is known to be the number one in their industry; the help and support, the features they are giving the clients comparing to other databases, the new technology, the provide a good solution. They are number one, in my opinion, I strongly recommend the product.

No product is ever perfect, there is always room for improvement and because of this I rate Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.

We used to work on business intelligence projects, so we really enjoyed the service-like performance.  It's been great.

The business intelligence is very good.

We have found that the analytics environment is excellent.

We've discovered that the solution is quite a complex product, which can make it difficult to sell. Snowflake, for example, is simpler and therefore an easy sell.

The customization can sometimes be difficult to achieve.

We've been working with the solution for a very long time. It's been more than 15 years personally and at least 15 years at this company, so it's been well over a decade at this point.

We don't deal with bugs or glitches and the product doesn't crash or freeze. The only real issues we come across are related to customization. It's quite stable. We haven't had problems.

We have about 100 people using the product currently.

Our clients are quite sizeable companies.

I've never used technical support and therefore can't really comment on their responsiveness or level of knowledge. I have an internal team that assists with troubleshooting as necessary.

As a consultancy, we work with a variety of products. This includes Oracle and Snowflake, for example.

We are an integrator of the solution. Our clients are sizeable companies, and there are several providers involved in different projects with Exadata. We're not the only administrators. 

I personally haven't handled an installation. We're mostly focused on projects related to BI and analytics. Someone else handles the setup and we just use the product or have our clients use it. I don't have a sense of whether the implementation is difficult or complex or how long deployments take.

We are a consultancy. We are partners with Oracle, with Snowflake, and with other vendors, software vendors.

We work in different deployment models with our customers. We try to fit our customers' needs. It depends on the customer and the project in terms of which deployment model we'll recommend or use.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It's very good. We've had a great experience using it over the years.

As we are a service provider for the government our job is to stabilize the database layer. We need to make sure all our data is secure. That's why we like to work with a robust environment like Exadata to make sure that our response time and our reliability are good.

Oracle Exadata's performance is one of its best features. We very satisfied with it. The previous equipment used to make a payment for all the government employees used to take at least two days for some of the transactions. Now, it will take hours to make the same amount of payments. Another thing is the flexibility to organize all of our databases. We can use it with new features that come with this version of Oracle 19c, which is the container database. With container databases, we can work with many databases, organized and segregated, and still access the functions and management, the things that most of the technical people like to have in place.

Regarding the technical side of the machine itself, I don't see much that needs improvement. In terms of the kind of service and support that most of the clients need, it is huge investments. I would like to emphasize that the clients that use these technologies from Oracle must be well supported by the Oracle company. This is one thing that I would like to address. They could have better support.

Additionally, the price for the Exadata is quite high. This is one thing that Oracle must think about. You can find the same features and the same performance that Oracle provides in other kinds of technology. So it depends on the client. If you want to use an Oracle engineered system, then you know that you have to pay.

Otherwise, you'll need to buy more for performance, replications, and the availability of these kinds of things. But you don't want to pay a lot. You have another option that Oracle support calls Oracle ODA. With ODA, you don't have to use machines, but you have the same kind of features and key performances. However, you may have reduced options for scalability with these kinds of Oracle solutions compared to the engineering system like Exadata. After buying these, you have the support that you need to maintain all these environments. This is what I want to address.

I will mention security. I know that there is a feature for security, but it is not included in the first purchase of this solution. That means if you need to increase the security, you need to buy the security feature which doesn't come by default on these solutions. As you may know, there are a lot of security problems all over the world with this kind of environment. Based on the fact that we are serving the government, we need to have security issues solved from the beginning and take care of security immediately. It would be better if Oracle could have some solutions that would bring us the confidence with their security at the outset. That's one thing I would like to address.

I'm not saying that there is no security on this machine. There is good security on the version of Oracle which is running on these machines, it's very nice. But I'm saying this because I know that Oracle can do more than that and bring the substation to the clients.

I have been using Oracle Exadata since 2010.

Even with the old machines, we didn't have any constraints with the stability. There were some problems regarding the hardware that you must change because they are getting holes and they fail more frequently. When the life cycle goes, it's the end. But on the other side, this machine is very stable.

Since we have had these machines in production, we haven't had any downtime. Over the last two years, we had a lot of downtime with the old machines because they were very old and did not have enough performance to solve the demands of the database. But we don't have any constraints about the stability with these new machines.

The strategy of the company was not to pay a lot, because we don't have much money. So we began with the scalability approach. We bought enough resources to sustain the demands of all our clients.

If the demands increase, we can also increase the resources and close off the cabinets. We can scale this machine anytime that we need. We can go until the version that they allowed for scalability. Then, if you need to maintain this technology, you can scale out and have two machines working together side by side.

This is a database machine. We have a system that hosts more than 20,000 citizens. So most of the time we have more than 3,000 transactions per day. As a service company for the government, every database resource is on this machine. We have at least three or four databases running on this machine and we have many applications that are running through this machine as well, so it serves all the countries.

The first line of maintenance is done by my team, including day to day operation. Support from Oracle is for things which are beyond our knowledge of database administration. Most of the time, the maintenance is done by us. But there is a point you must understand regarding the hardware maintenance. We are not allowed to do hardware maintenance, this belongs exclusively to the Oracle Team. The Oracle Team must be the one that does the hardware maintenance on these machines. Of course, we have a partner here in Mozambique who represents Oracle. This company is the one that is the second line of support. If they find something, they can escalate it to Oracle or they can solve it themselves.

When we started the company, we thought about the responsibilities that the company would have attending to all the requests from the government and that we would need to go to robot technology. We thought in 2002 to go directly to work with the Oracle database. So Oracle database was the first database technology we decided to use as our strategic plan for the stability of the company.

At that time, we start working with the small machines and after two or three years, we realized that there are a lot of scalability problems with those kinds of machines and stability issues with this kind of hardware. So that's why we we had lots of downtime and we spent lots of time correcting these kinds of problems instead of thinking about growing the business. So we moved these small machines to a bigger one in 2010. That's all extra data with the X-2 version, but these kinds of machines are getting old and they are out of order now. We cannot buy the spare parts or anything else we need. So we decided to keep using all of the technology, but moved from that environment to a new machine with a better performance.

This has seen better performance. That's why we are still working with only one technology, Oracle.

For Oracle Exadata, there are two main profiles that you have to take care of. One is the installation itself, like assembling the machines, which need some kind of expertise. The other is the installation of the software and creating the database, which need other kinds of equipment. From our perspective, our main goal within all of this is not about these two profiles. It's about the database engineering. Because we are coming from using an old machine, which is running an old version of Oracle, you will need to properly create not only the environment to host the database, you will also need to migrate from an old version of Oracle, like 11g, to 19c. This is another challenge that we have during implementation of these projects.

I can say that from acquisition it took at least, but not more than, five months to implement.

At acquisition we need to design the tenders and the rules of the company. The tender goes out, then it is published, then we evaluate all the tenders, then someone must win the tender. All this takes a lot of times. Then you go to the implementation phase. We did a workshop to design the solution. It took at least three weeks. Then it starts implementing the infrastructure. Migrating the database is another point because one database can take at least two days. That's the situation. But start to finish takes five months.

We did the assembling and installing of all these with the support of Oracle ACS, which is a very nice team that gives personal support for us. It was very good working with them. The other thing is the migrating itself. Migrating depends on each company because not all the companies have the same database architecture or the same data. That's why at the migration stage, 60% of the intervention of migrating from the old version of Oracle to the new version was done by my team. But the Oracle STS support was with us the whole time.

I would of course recommend Oracle Exadata to other people who are looking into implementing such solutions. They need to know what happens with this solution, what can be done with it, because as the government we cannot give out that information because it's not allowed. But, I would recommend it if a company wants to use these solutions, wants to have stability with their equipment, with their applications, and with their systems. If a company wants to be competitive in the market and have a good name, reputation and everything else, I think using Oracle, with the Oracle Exadata machine, is the best way to achieve that.

On a scale of one to ten, I can give Oracle Exadata a 9.

We have two primary use cases for Exadata. The first is for a financial services company, which is an online bank. We use this product for all of their transaction processing. In their locale, they have a lot of transactions related to the automotive industry.

The most valuable feature is the time to solution. 

The standard deviation that comes with it is helpful.

We appreciate the operational standards, which includes patching at least two times per year. This keeps it secure and up to date.

There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements. In my experience, rather than being handled by flash memory, it is being done using the hard drive. This slows it down a lot in certain cases. The reason this happens is that Temp IO often has a lower priority when compared to transactional operations such as Write Vault, Redo Vault, and Commit. This means that it can never get enough "attention" to be placed in flash memory.

The entry-level pricing is too high for the smaller shops.

Some additional built-in automation would be helpful. Some automation already exists in the software deployment process, but different components are handled differently, so more automation would be an improvement.

We have been using Oracle Exadata for about nine years, since 2011.

Stability-wise, I would rate this product close to ten out of ten.

Oracle Exadata is very scalable.

When one of our customers such as a bank employs one or more Exadata machines to handle database work, it means that the whole bank could be using it.

The technical support from Oracle is pretty good. It could be better at times but for the most part, they are knowledgeable.

The initial setup always comes with some complexity because it needs a lot from the customer to prepare the site, network, firewalls, and the rest. The deployment is always complex.

Preparing for deployment can take a couple of months, again depending on the requirements. There are standard things that have to take place, such as allocating space in the data center and making sure that the power, cabling, and switches are there. Once everything is in place, the software installation will take two or three days.

My team handles the deployment for our customers.

The licensing is the same as it is with other Oracle products, which depends on how many CPU cores are activated. In addition to that, there are storage licenses that are needed. All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle.

This is a product that I can recommend, although there needs to be a clear understanding of the use cases because Exadata doesn't come cheap. There is the requisition cost, the cost of support, costs for maintenance, and none of that is cheap. As long as there is a solid reason why Exadata is needed in the organization, I would definitely recommend it.

My suggestion for anybody who is implementing this solution is geared towards the in-house DBAs as opposed to customers in general. DBAs tend to handle Exadata the way they would any Oracle database, which is not the way to do it. Many of them have been working with Oracle databases for their entire career, and often, training on Exadata is necessary to get it working properly.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I was running an ERP system on Rackmount machines with critical databases on it. There is no way to scale-in and very expensive to scale-out as the system is growing countrywide. Replication between sites and branches not guaranteed. Also, the EOL of this infrastructure drives this huge change, and to avoid huge change management on the application point of view and the need to maintain the same database technology it was the biggest challenge that I ever faced during this times, moving from Version 9 to 11g and now to 19c.

It has improved the performance, now we run with more performance cores with less CPU to attend all the database demands. Reducing Time to Market, increase our ability to face the competition with speed and low cost. We improved the database availability while ensuring business continuity implementing efficient replication between main and DR site, so we decreased from one downtime in two months to zero downtime a year. So we can sleep as we are confident that data replication is running without any constraints. Multi-tenancy is one feature that can be used to guarantee the investment on this infra.

Business Continuity is the most valuable feature. The replication between the site via Data Guard is performing without any constraints, the agility to make tests of switchover, and back following disaster recovery procedure. The performance using this machine to providing database service is as easy as next to next database administrations. We can run AWR data collection for performance evaluation and problem-solving without any production performance constraints. Using Database partitioning and Cache Memory in each storage cell boost all we need as a database machine. The easy administration gives us time for training, improve our business understanding, and care about our competitors. Also, the container Database (CDB/PDB) together with other technologies (like Micro Services) can very improve the company core business.

The Oracle Support. I believe Oracle must improve its procedure to support the clients. The customer Ready Service must provide more use cases and benchmarks of their infrastructure to support client design decisions. Oracle must audit their partners regularly to guarantee they provide quality service even after been passed on partnership examination. Increase the FDP in the Southern Africa region can boost quality and competition on support service also increase product selling on these countries.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for bout nine years.

This machine are equipped with new edge of fault tolerance technologies ensuring business continuity. All servers have dual power supply and the hard drives are reliable. Following the Oracle procedure to assembly this hardware in your datacenter with clean power is one thing that guarantees the stability. Of course, a support contract must be signed off between client and oracle to predict all possible disruption on time.

There are many models of this engineering system, starting from X2 in 2011 to the last version X8M, you can choose a quarter, half and full, depending on your workload and budget. Starting with the quarter size you can scale it by adding more servers and storage until Full version or adding another box.

Every implementation is unique. I have been working with Oracle since 2005 and have not had issues regarding technical support. But Oracle must audit their implementation partners regularly to avoid major problems like a bad quality implementation that make clients raise a call.

The initial setup is not so complex as it is done by Oracle Experts and is validated by the senior engineers.

We implemented it through the vendor team. I worked with a very skilled personal, like project managers, ACS Support Leaders and technicians that have very experience in deploying this kind of systems

Using this infrastructure for a database as a service or Oracle Cloud at Customer/Service can be a good approx. to increase your ROI.

Going to EXADATA is not good advice for non-profit companies, like government institutions, all though this is a very safe infrastructure to guarantee security and availability for a long period. The OPEX must be well prepared for a period that can have all the return of the investment. Using EXADATA as a database as a Service (Multi-tenancy) can be an alternative to good ROI.

We also evaluated Postgress.

The primary use case is for maintaining contextual databases. In other words, it is for our online applications and services.  

The most valuable part of the product is performance enhancement.  

We still have to migrate to the latest version of Exadata, which we plan to do later this year or in the next year. Because of that, I am not sure we have anything that we would need to have added. I would need to consult our DBAs after we have migrated. They might find some issue that they would like addressed. But off the top of my head and because we are not on the newest version, it is not right to say the product needs something when it might already be there or has been updated.  

Exadata is practically a perfect solution for us as it stands. Because we are pretty satisfied with it, we have not rushed into the upgrade. I am not sure that we are fully utilizing the options that are currently on the table. For our contextual databases, it is the best option and we do not have any really an issue with it that needs improvement.  

We also need the product for other purposes. For analytics, we use Identity Two and we also need Microsoft Escrow Server for certain tasks. We accept some minor issues that I could identify if I discuss that with our DBAs. I do not think anything bothers us that much that we would need improvements. Of course, the price is the price, so it could always be less expensive. Maybe there are other considerations from the marketing side, but I do not deal with that.  

There are some issues with accounting where we really can not calculate return-on-investment. Exadata pays some fees for you so there is simplified billing, but that separates us from some evaluation of usage. Maybe Oracle could offer a solution for resolving that. Maybe a calculator or separate report that could help customers to find this data somehow. More clarity on this usage might affect how you estimate the workload of the storage and could really make clear what you get in return on using the product for the month.  

We migrated from Identity two on to Exadata sometime between five and six years ago.  

It is stable like other Oracle products.  

It is scalable. 

We developed some software for migration. The previous database was on the mainframe server and it was quite a nice product. We have a lot of experience, both with Oracle Exadata, with other databases, and other systems that we also use. We work with many solutions and we use what we think is best for a particular task. Contextual databases work especially well with Exadata.   

It is not really clear how to calculate the ROI for Exadata. Because you need to do the calculations for yourself, you need to know the license modeling pretty well. Even then, it is not very clear how much it costs for Exadata performance, CPU, and other additions. You really can not calculate these points when Exadata pays for you. Oracle could help customers to find out the actual numbers and help with calculations for ROI.  

If you compare an Oracle database on your system to buying into Exadata, which is an engineering system consisting of hardware, then, of course, it is more expensive. On the other hand, it gives you some possibilities to experience better performance than you would have if you would run Oracle on your servers. When you scale it up, it means that you actually get this additional hardware for free. You need to pay more for the license instead. This is one of the cost differences that is not very clear how to calculate. It is hard to tell how long it takes for one product or the other to become a cost advantage.  

There are some extra costs for hardware and for everything else if you upgrade to have better performance. At that point, the system uses not just the standard license, but also the storage shares. This can be quite significant when doing larger implementations. So the clarity of the cost models is something that could probably use some improvement from the Oracle side.  

It is quite difficult really to compare and evaluate all the solutions available. The market is pretty mature. We have to just make a shortlist of possible solutions from whatever products and solutions we are looking at and go from there. It is not realistic to do an in-depth analysis of everything.  

A lot of solutions that are more oriented toward network monitoring are now rebranded. The markets itself was previously called anomaly detection systems. Sometimes it is not quite clear which of the solutions really have additional capabilities that can make a difference without really studying them in-depth. We obviously looked at some extra products to contemplate and compare, and we continue to. But, for now, what we see and what we decided is where we will be staying. I am not sure that any product really offers a significant upgrade that is worth migrating for.  

Darktrace is a step ahead in some ways but, in this area, it is really difficult to assess clearly because there is a lot of the marketing fog. It is sometimes quite difficult to get to the facts about the advantages. It also may not be worth migrating when the product you are using will develop the same or similar capabilities.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Oracle Exadata highly. If you compare it to other engineering databases, I would rate it a nine.  

Practically perfect from my point-of-view.