Oracle Exadata Reviews

I am working with a supercluster combining Exadata and ExadataLogic. We have Exadata and superclusters in our organization, and I have been working with both since 2017.

Exadata's main feature is indexing. It also offers high backend speed between self-storage units and servers, which is beneficial for processing. The compute power is in the memory. These features allow for efficient processing.

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.

I am an enterprise architect, and I use the solution for transactional data in banking.

We have multiple transactions performed in multiple areas of banking. In India, we have UPI transactions, wallets, and virtual money, so there are several types of transactions going on. We can use a third party or a separate data warehouse such as Greenplum for the enterprise team. Oracle is easy to use for peripheral things, such as the data vault and the data firewall, data sync, and partitions. These are the features that give an edge to other databases. And when we sync between these databases from Exadata, it provides you with many features, such as compression ratios.

Database Consolidation and Performance are best on this platform. It is tailor-made to run the Oracle database and hence the defaults on this device force you to choose Oracle's best practices. No more moaning by your storage admin that he wants to carve out the Luns, that he doesn't understand ASM stripe and Mirror Everything S.A.M.E, and that he knows better what's good for the Oracle database. With the latest Optane memory and in-memory options, the flash cache becomes even more powerful.

The ability to patch with no downtime and the ability to ensure all the prerequisites are satisfied without manual intervention saves time and effort and makes the systems we deploy for our clients more secure. Licensing costs too are less for Oracle Linux and for clients moving to the Oracle cloud, it is included in the price of the subscription. With the new Exadata cloud @customer offering, there are even more ways to get the benefits of Exadata without large capital expenditure.

We are a telecommunications company. The information that we have there, it's Oracle Suite including a CRM, help service integration, and more. That's the core of the system. All the information is available to users using Oracle BI, and some other tools. We're very Oracle-based in our product choice.

In the past, all the reports that the organization needed would have to pass through a new requirement. And in order to create it, a person needed IT, and the developers. They would have to then test it and release it. Now, since we have this information available, access depends on the role, and the security filters and the user can access information and can make their own dashboards and reports and take decisions. They no longer need to go through IT and developers.

We have implemented Oracle EBS on Exadata several times. We mostly used Exadata as the data layer. The most significant gain was in the area of performance. Performance increased significantly both for OLTP and batch works.

In addition to the performance increase, we saw a significant decrease in IT operations, because the necessity of SQL tunning is decreased, the total work that is spent on administration operations decreased, and so on.
Another significant gain was the efficiency of the administration. In Exadata environments, one database machine admin (or DBA team) could manage not only the database, but storage (cells) and the OS as well.

As the Exadata is hardened by Oracle and it is the most important one among the system in the engineered systems group of Oracle, we haven't seen any big Exadata specific problems that could not be solved, yet. The latest Exadata machine is generation 6 (X-6) so there is a current knowledge base.

• Backup/Restore performance: Fast backups, fast restores (especially useful for creating clone environments)
• Low Memory utilization on database nodes: The database performs less work, especially for I/O. This is due to the ability to offload processing from the database nodes (compute nodes) to the storage nodes (cells).
• Decrease in I/O (from the perspective of database nodes): thanks to smart scan, the amount of data transferred from storage to database nodes significantly decreases.
• High I/O performance: Due to Smart Scan, storage indexes and intelligent storage server nodes and storage server software(cells).
• Decrease in database size and decrease in I/O: Due to Exadata specific compression techniques, database size decreases. In addition, the amount of I/O that is done for querying the same amount of data is decreased, as well. (This one also increases performance of the queries.)
• Increase in redo write speed: Smart flash logs provide better LGWR performance, as LGWR writes redo data both flash and disk in parallel. It considers whichever of these writes completes first as done.
• Smart Flash Logs are a new feature that comes with 11.2.2.2.4 cell software. They are not for reading. They are used like a circular buffer for redo writes. Smart Flash Logs can enhance the performance of an OLTP database.
• Ability to prioritize I/O using IORM: IORM is used for managing the Storage I/O resources. We can manage our I/O resources based on the Categories, Databases and Consumer Groups. The hierarchy that we build, used to distribute I/O.
• IORM must be used on Exadata if you have a lot of databases running on an Exadata Machine. IORM is a friend of consolidation projects, in my opinion.
• Automatic SR creation using ASR: Decreases management costs. Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) is a secure, scalable, customer-installable software feature of warranty and Oracle Support Services that provides auto-case generation when common hardware component faults occur. ASR manager can be installed on an external Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris server. Also, you can use one of the Exadata database nodes for installing ASR manager (not preferred).
• Implementing QOS for CPU using Instance caging: Instance caging can be used to limit the CPU usage in the database level. It is a good thing for building consolidation environment. It can be configured for preventing the non production residing on the same Exadata database machine to allocate the resources excessively, leaving no space in CPU queues for the production environments.
• Fast support by Oracle: Maybe it is because it is an engineered system or maybe it is because of another reason, the quality and speed of Oracle support is very satisfactory.
• Single vendor support: Software and hardware support by Oracle.
• High Availability: It is a Highly available database machine. It provides built-in high availability, at both software (for example: Oracle RAC) and hardware levels.
• Scalability: Exadata is a scale-out compute and storage platform.
• Ability to create tablespaces and datafiles very quickly.
• Offers a database environment built by Oracle: An Oracle database machine, that is built, optimized, certified and supported by the RDBMS vendor (Oracle). (Oracle RDBMS is the concern of this machine. Exadata is built for it.)
• InfiniBand network for RAC private interconnect: InfiniBand functionality. CPU cycles of the servers are not used for InfiniBand transport.

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.

The most valuable feature is the integration of the various components that make the performance soar. More specifically the presence of storage indexes along with the Exadata Storage Server software, which delivers process offloading, allows us to deliver better performance without indexes--saving space and CPU. This innovative feature is not something we would be able to replicate with other solutions. In addition, we consider the features smart scan, smart flashcache, smart flash log and hybrid columnar compression very useful.

Prior to Exadata, we were relying on daily ETLs from multiple source systems to load data into base tables, then we prepared a summary and materialized views from the base to data marts which were eventually exposed to the end users. This process used to take 18 hours. So, the data was always at least 18 hours late, and occasionally later, if the ETLs failed. This caused two issues: first, most managers simply were not able to make quick decisions because the data was stale and second, for most important functions, the users got the data from our OLTP system which taxed that system's capacity.

After Exadata, we observed three immediate benefits:

• The ETLs finish in 3 hours (down from 18), making the data fresh and enabling the managers to make quick decisions. Campaigns used to take days but take a few hours now
• Users no longer go to the OLTP system, reducing the impact there and saving us from upgrades
• There is no need to build summaries; so some of the data is available almost immediately, allowing most decisions to be taken on near-realtime data which was impossible pre-Exadata