Oracle Exadata Reviews

The performance on the databases is good.

You get less timing and latency with this product. When you compare the solution to some other devices as compared to this Exadata, the latency units are very high on them. When you talk about the performance of this specific solution, it's excellent.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is helpful.

The setup is a little bit complex. We would like to see the installation part get easier. Also, this installation is only for the OEM. They need partners.

Some liberty should be given to the customer when we talk about licensing. They should work to make it more flexible and give customers more options.

I've been using the solution for almost five and a half years.

The solution is very stable. The performance is good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability of the solution is quite good.

Technical support is fine. It is okay.

We are only working with Oracle. We haven't used a different solution. 

I didn't handle any aspect of the initial setup. That said, it's my understanding that the initial setup is a bit complex and difficult.

We are not doing the installation right now. Everything is done by Oracle only. Exadata doesn't get involved in it.

When you talk about the pricing, the pricing is on the higher side. That said, if you're looking for good performance, then you definitely need to pay the price. Therefore, the price is reasonable.

We are a distributor. We are a global distributor for this Oracle, and we have a partnership with them.

If you're looking for excellent, performance Exadata is definitely the best option to go for.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

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.

Speed and stability.

Payroll used to take two and a half days. It now takes one or two hours.

The Oracle support team needs to understand the product better than the customers do.

We have been using this solution for one and a half years.

We had no deployment issues.

We had minor stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

Customer service was OK.

Technical support was OK.

We switched due to our corporate growth and our performance needs.

The setup was straightforward.

We did the implementation in-house.

We evaluated EMC and SSD storage arrays.

The High Availability and rolling upgrade features are the most important for us. They help us achieve zero downtime and increased performance.

The biggest advantage to our implementation of Exadata is that because it's an Oracle-engineered system, our database administrations don't have to worry about performance tuning. It's already optimally tuned and, when compared to other systems, it's really provided us with better performance.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It is brand new for us, and we are slowly getting other databases into it. So far, it's good, but we are not using 100% of them, so we still have to learn a lot.

It has the best scalability of all our Oracle products.

We've created a lot of cases, so we're in touch with Oracle support frequently. The service is consistent across all our Oracle products because they're located in one place.

We previously used IBM InfoSphere Warehouse.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Oracle provided us with an on-site consultant to perform the installation.

We also looked at Microsoft SQL. We chose Exadata as we have other Oracle products, including Database.

If you are buying Exadata, be sure to go with the latest version.

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.  

All business Oracle databases were spread across many DB servers and different platforms. We consolidated all of our databases onto a single Exadata box to ensure that they were running on the same platform and have greater coordination and integration between the databases. Also, we gained performance without much change in the database code, as well as saved a greater amount of space by applying the compression feature. 

We experienced a significant performance improvement without changing the code, simply utilizing Oracle Exadata standard smart features including Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, and Storage Indexes.

We saved a great amount of storage by applying different levels of HCC and removing ninety percent of the indexes. This is a powerful and extremely stable system with IB network speed.

Most of the Exadata features are enabled by default, without the need for configuration. For example, the smart features include Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Storage Indexes, and IB 40GB. 

Compression is a great feature, where one can really save a lot of storage.

Oracle has introduced Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and autonomous features for automatic database tuning. The new addition of X8M has come with a direct memory read future to deliver amazing performance for all sorts of OLTP and analytics workloads. This should benefit the Exa community.

General perception from many customers is the cost and maintenance of exadata database machine. Although Oracle recently introduced low cost storage and automated many features, still the cost and maintenance is a concern. Oracle should provide free of cost the Exadata software on the box to have more customers.

We have been using this solution for more than eight years.

Every component in the Oracle Exadata database is redundant. Hence, it provides HA for every layer.

This solution offers the flexibility to add more servers, storage servers, or a combination of both.

Oracle support service needs more improvement.

We haven't used Engineered Systems for Oracle database platforms, though, we were on various platforms that were difficult to manage and maintain.

The bare metal setup is done by Oracle professionals and managed by them. Though, customers can manage this on their own, depending on the skill set of their team.

Our implementation was done on-site, through the vendor.

We realize ROI through higher throughput, high availability, and business continuity.

Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution.

We compared other market players of Engineered systems. However, Oracle Exadata features are unmatched by other players in the market.

Oracle is coming out with many advanced hardware additions and software solutions to make this product the world's best database machine.

The solution is used for Extreme Bare metal and virtual compute performance for the business to scale up as per the heterogeneous database loads.

Exadata has greatly benefited our business cycle as operational efficiency has improved by 200%.

Also, our business analytics platform performance has improved by 300%

Exadata uses a scale-out design with unique optimizations that include persistent memory, SQL query offload, and built-in resource management to optimize performance for OLTP, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads running in consolidated environments.

• Exadata Smart Flash Cache - caches database objects with flash memory operations.
• Integrated appliance with all components supported by one vendor, Oracle.

• It needs built-in big data features.
• I'd like to see smart auto-healing features with machine-learning libraries.
• Less power consumption would be nice.
• It needs integrated cloud software to enable cloud connectivity.

Exadata X9M uses a combination of scale-out storage, RDMA over Converged Ethernet networking, database offload, persistent memory accelerator, and PCIe Flash to deliver extremely high performance from memory and flash.

We have been using the solution for ten years.

There were no stability issues.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

Oracle customer service is the best in the industry.

Technical Support:

Technical support for Exadata is the best in the industry.

Positive

Traditional Oracle RAC to Oracle Exadata RAC due to having scalable and robust database consolidated platform for upcoming release 12.2, which can consolidate multi-character sets within a single container and heterogeneous data guard support.

It was a bit complex to fit in with our business requirements initially, but post-implementation it was great. It will work as the most stable and scalable database ever run on Linux with various complex workloads.

We implemented it in-house and advisors for major global Exadata deployments helped.

We have seen a 300% ROI.

Oracle needs to reduce the licensing cost to get more market penetration and offer an Open Financing Option.

We evaluated SAP HANA and other relevant platform for analytics.

I would truly recommend this to all SMEs and Big Enterprises for consolidating databases with a unified next-generation platform.

It enables us to consolidate, that's one thing. We have consolidated five databases into one box, so that definitely a cost-savings there. We migrated from ODS to X5-2, so that is one thing.

The second thing of course are the extra features like the storage indexes. In short, the main feature that we take advantage of is the intelligence within the  storage which makes it no longer a "dumb storage" server. That is another main thing.

We did some PoC tests with our own data, and we were really getting 10x using Hybrid Columnar Compression, unique to Exadata, so some cost savings there.

Those are the things. Performance has gotten better, less footprint, and consolidation.

Including the migration, it's around a little more than a year now.

It has been pretty stable. We haven't seen many issues. Yes, we have hit some bugs, but otherwise it's pretty stable. It's a lot of mature boxes now. It's, again, an X5-2; it's mature enough.

We have a half rack now. If we at all feel like we need more compute, we can definitely add on more racks. So scalability, definitely a yes.

It is excellent. In our organization, my team did the first migration, so it was all new to everyone. From the installation team to internal support teams, and my team which is the application DBAs, which really worked on the migration. Checking stuff and letting us know if there were any changes to be made; for all of those, even with the migration, we got excellent support.

That was part of the agreement between the parties, that they would help us with the first migration.

We were using ODS.

Personally, my requirements when looking for in a vendor: Definitely one is they have to be leading in that technology in the industry. The vendor should also make me want to use the latest proven technologies, we cannot take chances with that. Whichever is the case, whatever we are using a product for, that particular product has to be the industry best. That is one thing.

Another thing is definitely that it needs to be a known partner like Oracle. They know the people we know, so that gives comfort that, middle of the night, if you have an issue, you can call this person. In short, proven support.