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Amazon EMR vs Oracle Exadata comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.4
Amazon EMR delivers significant cost savings and efficiency, with some users achieving up to 20% savings and positive ROI.
Sentiment score
6.3
Oracle Exadata offers early break-even, reduced costs, increased performance, and significant savings despite complex licensing challenges.
The investment is good, which is why people choose this hardware.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR support is generally proactive and responsive, though user experiences vary, especially during open-source integrations.
Sentiment score
6.5
Oracle Exadata support praised for expertise, but critiques focus on delays and process efficiency improvement needs.
We get all call support, screen sharing support, and immediate support, so there are no problems.
They help with billing, cost determination, IAM properties, security compliance, and deployment and migration activities.
This involved creating blueprints for integrating Oracle products into client systems, followed by technical presentations to Oracle teams and stakeholders.
Exadata comes with a platinum gateway and comprehensive support, which often gets immediate attention with severity one cases.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon EMR is scalable and versatile, though some face resource speed issues and performance differences between environments.
Sentiment score
7.5
Oracle Exadata offers efficient scalability with flexible configurations, easy expansion, and high costs; ensure compatible hardware generations.
Scalability can be provisioned using the auto-scaling feature, EC2 instances, on-demand instances, and storage locations like block storage, S3, or file storage.
Within a site, scalability is excellent.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon EMR is stable and reliable, with high availability, but could improve slightly to address occasional concerns.
Sentiment score
7.8
Oracle Exadata is praised for reliability and stability, with improved models offering redundancy and high availability, minimizing downtime.
Regular updates, patch installations, monitoring, logging, alerting, and disaster recovery activities are crucial for maintaining stability.
Once installed, Exadata is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EMR requires improved user-friendliness, stability, monitoring, integration, and pricing adjustments to enhance performance, scalability, and compatibility.
Oracle Exadata needs cost management, simplified patching, improved support, better customization, enhanced security, and third-party integration.
The cost factor differs significantly. When you run Spark application on EKS, you run at the pod level, so you can control the compute cost. But in Amazon EMR, when you have to run one application, you have to launch the entire EC2.
There is room for improvement with respect to retries, handling the volume of data on S3 buckets, cluster provisioning, scaling, termination, security, and integration between services like S3, Glue, Lake Formation, and DynamoDB.
There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and customization options.
I cannot create an extended rack cluster with one node on one site and another node on a different site.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EMR pricing is usage-based, perceived higher, but optimizable through instance management and auto-scaling for Big Data tasks.
Oracle Exadata's high costs are justified by its performance and reliability, offering value through reduced operational expenses.
Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 instances, instance sizes, Kubernetes, Docker services, storage, and data transfers.
I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EMR offers scalable, cost-effective data processing with easy integration, advanced features, and robust management on a cloud-based infrastructure.
Oracle Exadata enhances performance, handles large databases efficiently, and simplifies management with advanced features and intelligent storage capabilities.
Amazon EMR helps in scalability, real-time and batch processing of data, handling efficient data sources, and managing data lakes, data stores, and data marts on file systems and in S3 buckets.
Amazon EMR provides out-of-the-box functionality because we can deploy and get Spark functionality over Hadoop.
The most valuable features of Oracle Exadata are its high availability and cluster environment.
It also offers high backend speed between self-storage units and servers, which is beneficial for processing.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EMR
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (3rd), Cloud Data Warehouse (13th)
Oracle Exadata
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
129
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Prashant  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless data integration enhances reporting efficiency and an easy setup
Amazon EMR has multiple connectors that can connect to various data sources. The service charges are based on processing only, depending on the resources used, which can help save money. It is easy to integrate with other services for storage, allowing data to be shifted to cheaper storage based on usage.
Mladen Vidic - PeerSpot reviewer
High availability and cluster support enhance daily operations and transaction processing.
We use Oracle Exadata for several enterprise databases that accommodate all-day operations on two Exadatas. I can't disclose the specific use of these databases, but they handle heavy connections and a large number of transactions. This environment is set up to process requests from a transaction…
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
12%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business47
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise86
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EMR?
Amazon EMR is a good solution that can be used to manage big data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EMR?
Compared to others, Amazon seems efficient and is considered good for Big Data workloads. Costs are involved based on cluster resources, data volumes, EC2 ( /products/amazon-ec2-reviews ) instances...
What needs improvement with Amazon EMR?
I have used AWS Glue with S3 for making tables and databases, but regarding Amazon EMR, I do not remember much as we are currently using it very minimally. This is my observation: In EKS, we have h...
What do you like most about Oracle Exadata?
It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata?
The cost of Oracle Exadata is substantial, particularly in terms of maintenance costs and licensing. This pricing strategy has led to strained relationships with IT companies including HP and Cisco...
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata?
Patching Oracle Exadata can be challenging due to its numerous components including network, blade, CPU, storage, and VMs. The system's complexity extends beyond simple maintenance tasks. The perfo...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yelp
PayPal, EBS, Organic Food Retailer, Garmin, University of Minnesota, Major Semiconductor Company, Deutsche Bank, Starwood, Ziraat Bank, SK Telecom, and P&G.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EMR vs. Oracle Exadata and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,846 professionals have used our research since 2012.