Oracle Exadata Reviews

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.

I use Oracle Exadata in the context of banking. The system's ability to quickly access and process large amounts of data is crucial, especially when handling extensive datasets. This rapid data retrieval ensures minimal delays for end-users accessing the system.

It offers a significant advantage for accommodating a large number of users. To put it in perspective, a standard Oracle database may only support around four hundred to five hundred simultaneous users. However, when utilizing Exadata, this capacity can be dramatically increased to accommodate two thousand or even three thousand simultaneous end users, demonstrating its scalability and performance capabilities.

There's room for improvement in terms of deployment, as it could be made faster and more user-friendly. I also have reservations about the cost, it is significantly high.

I have been using it for several years.

It provides good stability capabilities.

It can effectively handle a large number of users, making it a robust and scalable solution.

Their customer support is really good. I would rate it eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is not complex and it can be installed in just a few hours.

The duration of deployment depends on a variety of factors, including the database size, the number of tables to be installed, and the configuration of storage spaces. The process can be time-consuming, and it's highly dependent on the specific requirements of the deployment. One or two engineers are typically sufficient to maintain Exadata.

It is quite expensive. Nevertheless, its numerous strengths and advantages make it a compelling choice.

If you opt for cloud-based solutions, it might not be a necessary choice for your business. However, in non-cloud environments, Exadata becomes valuable for handling a large user base efficiently, leading to faster performance. I woudl rate it eight out of ten.

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.

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 number one feature is the speed; it's InfiniBand. We're serving almost 3.2 million people; it's an eligibility system. We add on 80 TB of data that needs to be churned and processed. Previously, we used Sun Solaris, and then we moved to a Windows platform. It was really bad. We started the load on Tuesday, and sometime around noon on Wednesday it finished. Sometimes, it would crash. Right now, it all finishes within 4.5-5 hours. If it starts at 6 o’clock, it’s done by 9 o’clock. That is one big advantage we see.

The standard Oracle things that we have, such as compression, are also valuable.
Now, all of our development to pre-production – everything – is in one single rack, which is easier for us to do. Production is on another full rack. That's what we use it for.

Pretty much whatever we need from the database side, it is there. There are specific things from the application side. I do not have a list; they do have a list of what you can't see from the database side. Pretty much what we are looking for is part of the 12c that is coming out. Most developers are used to Microsoft .NET and SQL Server. We are all cutting out Oracle, so there is a shift within the developer's mind; how am I going to use it; starting from the modeling to how to use it; key items; for example, I need to have a temporary table to create a gdd; there's an identity column in SQL that automatically fills in, and it used to have triggers.

The 12c is coming. There are some good features coming that I'm looking for. At a conference earlier this year, I was part of the session on what is new in 12c. I'm really excited about that.

We're doing real-time analytics, so one other thing is whether NoSQL is the best fit or not. We need to evaluate that, which we have not done yet. Pretty much, we are thinking that we have Exadata, so we want to use that product.

I have been using it for 3.5-4 years.

It is absolutely a stable solution. After we moved to Exadata, the stability has been good. Number one is, we used to go through Microsoft patching every month. With Exadata and Linux, we only have to do the firmware once per quarter. We try to coordinate that with quarterly Oracle patches. It isn’t really required; we only do it because we are behind two firewalls. We don't have to apply all the patches.

It is absolutely scalable. We have five enterprise applications of our own. They're all public-facing systems. Going back to the performance, on any given day, anywhere between 5,000-8,000 internal people use it, and we do have a public-facing system. People apply for benefits, and it's entirely public, so they can use it. Compared to our previous system, if you look at the performance metrics, some of them show almost 30-40% improvement. Some of the batches are almost 70% improvement.

If you look at the backend side – logical export backups, RMANs, and disaster recovery; all of those things – there is a tremendous increase.

Technical support is pretty good. There are certain areas specific to the enterprise application where we might not be getting Oracle support. But for Oracle products, it is pretty good.

We brought Oracle in to set it up, so it still is with Oracle. We didn't go through the entire setup process because Oracle was part of it. Oracle itself did it, so it was pretty easy for us. Again, one good thing is, we don't have to really worry about the patching, OS levels, and other stuff. It is pretty easy for us.

There are still a few issues that we are working on, but from a performance point of view, ease of use, scalability and reliability, plus we took a performance option for the storage – we were at capacity, so now we are good with the capacity, too – overall, I feel like everybody is happy with the product.

When I am looking at vendors like Oracle, the primary criteria will be the support. When you go through an issue, we need an immediate solution; it’s a 24/7 application. We don't anticipate anything. For example, something like, when we were going through a patching, and suddenly I found an issue. I didn’t see it in my lower environments, and now my production is impacted. We created a severity one ticket. How soon? And can I trust it? That's number one.

There may be some custom solutions we may be looking at, but it's not part of the product. Depending on what type of solution it is, we might need additional support and also training. I think Oracle is growing. I've been using Oracle since 1991, so I know how much it grew outside the database. Training is one of the biggest issues that we are having. We moved from a Windows platform to a Linux platform. Also, how to manage the entire thing; Enterprise Manager completely changed. One is self-learning, another one is vendor-provided, low-cost training. Those are the things we are looking for.

On top of that, you can say there are certain things that can benefit us; there is a new release coming out. If they can provide another training session, like, "Hey, this worried us, and here are the documents." Something like that would really help our DBAs to be at the cutting edge, rather than they themselves having to explore. Those are all things.

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.

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.

We use Oracle Exadata for databases and for migrations from on-premise to the cloud.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the storage available.

Oracle Exadata could improve by having faster data retrieval. We receive data at four or five seconds and want to reduce that number to one second.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately six years.

The stability of the solution is good.

I rate the stability of Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.

We have 150 people using this solution.

The solution is not scalable because it is on-premise.

The support is helpful.

The intital implmentaion of Oracle Exadata is difficult.The data is complicated. We have multiple queries and multiple processes pulling this data. There is complete logic inside.

We have a team of software and data engineers and architects that do the implementation of the solution.

The price of the solution could improve, it is expensive.

We are moving away from using Oracle Exadata. 

I would recommend this solution to others, but it depends on the use case.

I rate Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.