Oracle Exadata Reviews

Smart scan and smart indices are the most valuable features.

It improved the query performance.

I would like to see improvement in retail store response times.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were deployment issues, but the dev team fixed them.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

I would give customer service a rating of 7/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We did not use a previous solution.

The installation was straightforward with Oracle support.

We implemented with Oracle.

Its most valuable feature is the smart scan functionality. It allows for the queries to work faster. It offloads the stuff to the cell server, so it provides better performance.

I like the consolidation of all the components in one feature. I like the fact that it's very specialized and you can go ahead and utilize it, out of the box. It is intuitively different than a normal database solution; you have to actually design for it. For example, you get rid of indexes instead of creating them. It's a little different; you really need to get up to speed on what the functionality is in order to optimize it. There are a few different things that you can use, such as compression; you can use all kinds of different features that it has.

A lot of the extra features they're adding are wonderful, but they're always putting a price on it, for example, the in-memory thing. For certain things, such as Exadata, we're going to stay with on-premises because of regulations. It feels like for anything new, it's almost like they want another license fee; that's the down side.

Maybe they could make the licensing not so bad. If you're already buying something that costs a quarter of a million dollars up to a half a million dollars, maybe they could throw in some extra bang for the buck, some freebies.

It is hardware; things break. It does have some redundancy in it, you will see a performance hit at certain periods of time, but I do like the fact that it does have a lot of failover.

The scalability is a little bit difficult, actually. A lot of people advertise it as being easy, but what happens is: when you have a previous version and you want to scale that version, they're already into a new version. It's almost better just to buy the new X6 instead of trying to expand your X3. If you want to do scalability, you have to do it immediately within a year; you can't wait.

Actually, level one support is OK. It's no different than what most DBAs themselves can handle. Right now, we have a challenge with some wrong results on Exadata, and it's taking a number of weeks; we have clients that are very upset. I would say technical support is a mix. It depends on how difficult the question is, and if it was encountered before. If it was encountered before, really fast. If not, you have to go to development and it can take a while.

We did not previously use a different solution. It's a data warehousing product. I know you can use it for online transaction processing, but it's perfectly wonderful for data warehousing. It has a tremendous increase in performance; it's like night and day. We still have some people that are on old systems that we're moving and it's like night and day. You can put really lousy code on it and make that code run good. I'm not saying the code was lousy; I'm just saying that Exadata handles the code differently. If you know how to optimize it, you have to optimize it, though. If you try to put the old code on, don't make your indexes invisible and don't understand how it works, you can actually cause a degradation in performance. You need someone on staff or Oracle help with the understanding of what the differences are, so that you can really make it work for you.

I have a huge background in UNIX hardware, networking and database. For me, it was extremely straightforward. For someone who has just one job function, for example, just a DBA, it would be very challenging. I work with some people for whom it is extremely challenging because they don't have the other aspects; they only understand database and that's a problem if you want to work in Exadata.

In the past, we were looking at EMC solutions; the flash, the different disks and so on. It still wasn't able or capable to function the way that the Exadata does. That's why Exadata won out, but Exadata could probably improve itself by using some of that state-of-the-art flash in the product more. They could even improve on the design by using more up-to-date disks and technologies, that are out there now.

When I’m selecting a vendor such as Oracle the most important criteria for me are reputation, stability, performance; that kind of criteria.

If a friend asked me about Exadata, I would encourage them to go with it.

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.

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.

Performance.

Excavation is purely for the storage of the data warehouses. It does what it needs to do. It performs. We have an active-passive DR. We tested it, it works. We can switch datacenters within reasonable time and go completely live in another data center on the technology we have.

We bought the whole stack, so we have extra discs. We have one month to show that an application doesn't work. We found out that installing and running the software on Oracle, was better than on the other platforms we used before.

Off the top of my head I can't think of anything.

A year and a half to two years.

No downtime.

In my eyes, it is going to meet the company's needs moving forward.

We have some very good internal guys who handle most of the issues. Actually, we haven't had many issues at all.

No vendor is reliable. We say there's a difference between proven in PowerPoint and proven in practice. We always find out in practice if it really works.

Personally, what I like to see is somebody who understands the business. What I see is that a lot of vendors are mainly focused on technology and not on the business functions you want to build. I believe that technology can be bought while the intellectual property is in the business services that you deliver to an organization. That's what I look for.

Exadata storage cell offloading software is the most valuable feature.

With Exadata database migration we saw a 50x performance gain.

• DevOps and built-in AI libraries to overcome storage.
• Oracle data-file high water mark and self healing, self scale up, scale down.

I have been using Exadata for eight years.

We have not experienced many issues with stability, except with some cell node bugs.

We didn’t have scalability issues.

They have an extremely great Oracle team.

Traditional RAC to optimize all-in-one appliance hardware, database, software, network, storage.

Setup was straightforward.

Oracle should offer free cell node licensing to encourage current RAC clients to switch.

We explored Teradata, Cisco and EMC appliances.

Negotiate with Oracle for licensing and consolidation of licensing.

The performance of Smart Scan, Storage Indexes, etc., and the High Availability features are all valuable to us.

We have a complete HA environment with two Exadata machines across two datacenters. We've able to use Data Guard to perform switchovers, perform maintenance, and do other tasks with little or no downtime at all.

The Lifecycle Management over the whole stack could be improved over what it already provides. The rolling upgrade feature on the database itself should be improved. It needs some Java updates as well as there is too much downtime related to Java issues.

I've been using the platform for five years, and my customer is now buying Exadata X5-2.

We didn't have an issue with deployment.

While we have am MAA environment, it is absolutely robust. We've had no issues with any instability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Oracle Support Services should be improved. The customer has seen more and more discussions within the Oracle Support Groups indicating that support has done more and more finger-pointing, which doesn't help the customer to fix problems.

5/10 - They have a lot to improve upon.

There was no solution previously in place.

The initial setup was complex, but it was well planned by Oracle ACS.

We implemented it between Oracle ACS and an in-house team.

The pricing and licensing is really complex and you need to have a very detailed plan.

The customer looked at a Hitachi solution.

Start with a good POC and then make the decision.

The extreme performance and data compression that comes straight out of the box.

With Exadata, everything is simply better optimized, and our organization has been leveraging the fact that it can now manage larger volumes of data much more easily than it could previously. For example, we almost never hear our internal or external customers complain about performance issues these days. Performance problems were a recurring problem for us in the past.

X5 supports virtualization, but I think the performance on virtualization is not all that great. I have heard it from a customer, though I admit I haven't tested it out myself.

We have been using this for about three months.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We find X5 to be very scalable.

We have always had excellent customer service.

It's excellent.

We were convinced that with Exadata we would be able to consolidate our databases, have a serious performance boost, and leave a smaller footprint on the Data Center.

There were some complexities because a lot of departments were involved, and there were some communication gaps, but generally speaking, it went smoothly.

It was done in-house, but with help from Oracle.

Your TCO and Operational expenses will definitely go down with Exadata.

No, we were pretty much decided on Exadata from the outset.

This product actually does what it promises to - it gives extreme performance on your data set.