Oracle Database Appliance Reviews

We use the histories to make reports like the MIS (Management Information System) reports. Mainly it is a database.  

I think the most valuable part of the Oracle Database Appliance is just the ability to use the database. We make the reports on our own and let Oracle do what it does best.  

We try to operate through the ODI, or Oracle Data Integrator, to maintain data integration. We have plans to use Visual I/O for data mapping, data flow, and things like that. Oracle could improve the capabilities for visualizing without other, third-party tools. But it is OK.  

We are not looking for any new features in the product. Whatever additional utility we need we have been able to do using Hadoop for now. For us, the product can stay the same. The only way it can improve is by doing even better with integrations to other products like Hadoop.  

The company has been using this product since before I came here. It has been in use for a very long time. I would say it is maybe 10 years or more.  

Over the course of these ten years, I would say that this product has been stable.  

We have recently moved the Oracle Database to work with SAP (Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing). We did this because we are planning to start now to scale up. We have a very good profile now to work with. I think scalability is good.  

I think we already have 100 users working with this product in their organizations. We are planning to scale up.  

Most of the time we are doing the technical support by ourselves. When Oracle does not offer much support, we have to do it by ourselves.  

We started with Oracle. We did not use another product before that.  

The initial setup is easy to do because we have the ability to do it in house. We are able to deploy this product by ourselves, without an integrator. That suggests it is easy enough to do.  

We have a team of six people that we need for deployment and for maintenance.  

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees.  

It is not a product we evaluated to use instead of Oracle, but we have some small products we use with it to enhance the functionality and capabilities. For example, we use Hadoop for data modeling and other things. We plan to keep on using Oracle Database Appliance and we will do our data mining with Hadoop. We saw there was reason to use Hadoop with Oracle to have a better overall solution.  

I think for people interested in using Oracle Appliance the main thing is to rely on Oracle for the bigger stuff that it does. Maybe it cannot provide the kind of reports that we want. This is how we have determined the importance of Hadoop to our processes. Hadoop is part of my recommendation to other users who try this product. Oracle can do what it does best and Hadoop can help with reporting on the data. For other use cases, companies may need a different solution to enhance what Oracle provides — to complete one small part of the picture. When you find it, you should use it.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is worst and ten is best), I would rate Oracle Database Appliance as an eight-out-of-ten.  

Report processing time has been reduced. We can use it in the future for our BI tool.

The performance due to the all-flash of ODA is very nice. 

The main thing would be to make ODA more affordable, to make it a more economical machine. Also, I would like to see virtualization, so you could implement all of your functions on one machine. Finally, improvement in the speed and performance would be good.

Stability is very good. There has been no downtime.

Scalability means you can increase the storage. 

ODA support is very good. Oracle support is very good. Online support is very good. Our local partner is also very good.

Previously I was using Exadata. Our technical team was already familiar with Oracle products so that's why we choose ODA. We had a license for Oracle Database.

When selecting a vendor the main criterion is support. Oracle support is very good.

The initial setup was very easy.

My advice would depend on the needs of the company. If the need is like ours, number of transactions per day, number of transactions per year; and whether the operation time is 24 hours, eight hours; these are the types of things to consider when deciding. Also, what is the downtime you can afford?

ODA performance has been very good for our requirements.

I would rate it at eight out of 10 because the product is stable, it has very low downtime, and the support of Oracle is very good.

Offers easy deployment and setup.

It hosts many applications and deploys ODA quickly.

Patching cycles have many bugs that need to be addressed.

The most valuable feature is the ability to use it as a virtualization platform. This is great because you can run the Oracle Database layer as ODA_BASE domain and use Oracle VM templates to build Oracle applications as VMs so you can also have the application layer in the same platform.

It is easy in terms of management of virtual infrastructure. With "oakcli" is the all-in-one CLI to manipulate the virtual environment of the ODA.

It had a lot of bugs, especially with the old patch bundles. There was no support for connecting it to an FC tape drive for backups.

The ODA X3-2 has been up and running since August 2013. This was the first model of the appliance.

We had issues with the virtual infrastructure. Sometimes the shared repositories go into status Unknown, VMs crashing etc. Also the automatic failover of the VMs sometimes failed.

We had no issues with scalability. It allows only two disk enclosures for storage space, and for servers you can upgrade the RAM.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10.

Our previous solutions were building a high availability environment for Oracle Database with blocks, server storage OS, network configuration, etc.

The setup was very easy. It is great to have a fully configured and tested HA environment for Oracle Database in two days. All the built-in automation scripts do it for you.

If you compare the pricing of ODA vs traditional architecture it can be a bit high but you get more value by minimizing the risk, a short implementation time, and all-in-one patching.

There are no solutions like ODA.

Overall it is a great product for consolidating Oracle Databases.

With the newer models there are a lot of optimizations both in hardware and software. For example the cluster interconnect card went from 10GbE in ODA X3-2 to InfiniBand QDR in ODA X5-2. The "oakcli" has added features with the new patch bundles.

We use Oracle Database Appliance for database consolidation.

I would like it if the scalability could be increased without having to change versions. There is only so much that you can do with it. It's not like software that you are free to install anywhere.

I have been working with Oracle Database Appliance for a few years.

We work with two versions, but they are not new versions, and they are not the same versions.

Oracle Database Appliance is a stable solution.

Oracle Database Appliance, as an appliance, is limited in terms of how far you can scale it. Because it comes with prebuilt equipment, there is a limit to how much storage you can put into it. It's a prebuilt Appliance.

If you want to scale, then you have to change. You now have a more recent version. There are several variations. As a result, you must upgrade to a newer version.

In our company, we have six engineers who use this solution.

Oracle has good technical support.

Whether it is local or on the internet, they have good support.

It's not difficult if you've done installations before. There is documentation.

Everything is labeled, but it cannot be done by just anyone; you must have knowledge of the infrastructure.

Even though the documentation is available, everything is labeled and you simply plugin according to the diagram. It isn't a problem. It isn't difficult.

The deployment can be done by one person, either a technician or an engineer.

You must pay for the license. It is usually an annual subscription.

I would give it a seven out of ten as there is a limit to how much you can scale. You can't go beyond what the appliance provides.

In Turkey, there are some highway toll collection systems that use Oracle Database Appliance.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Database Appliance is the ease of management.

Oracle Database Appliance is stopping support for the standard edition and only continuing support for the RAC One Node. They did not inform us and we are having problems with our customers. We are not having to change our systems from standard to something else.

I have been using Oracle Database Appliance for approximately five years.

We did not have any stability issues with Oracle Database Appliance.

Oracle Database Appliance is scalable according to the license purchased. We didn't need any extra storage, but if we need storage we can add it.

We have many systems and toll collection systems using the solution. The call centers that use the solution have approximately 100 people using each environment.

The hardware support of Oracle Database Appliance was not good five years ago, but now it is.

The support is responsive and solves the issues. Most of the support is automated, and when we send the snapshot automation fails they are easily solved.

I rate the support from Oracle Database Appliance a five out of five.

Positive

I have not used another solution similar to Oracle Database Appliance.

The Oracle Database Appliance has an easy installation. It took approximately four to five hours. If we do not do a re-image it can be done in one to two hours.

We did the implementation of the solution in-house with one person.

I don’t know ODA and alternative system prices. But Oracle the database license is quite expensive and a lot of my customers plan to migrate to open source databases like PostgreSQL.

I rate the price of Oracle Database Appliance a four out of five.

I would recommend people to use this solution it is good.

I rate Oracle Database Appliance an eight out of ten.

ODA has two most valuable features. First, it’s very easy to deploy. Once received, you can unpack it, rack it, install it in less than one day and having a fully usable machine very quickly.

The second feature is its scalability: you can start with a small configuration (regarding Oracle licensing) and then enable Oracle CPU depending on your needs.

Not my organization because I work as a consultant. But one of my customers who has bought an ODA started a database for 10 shops and then he grew the number of CPUs enabled each time he opened some new shops.

Only one time during an upgrade, because the customer made some modifications in the machine configuration and he forgot that ODA is an appliance, not a traditional platform. So you have to be careful when you want to modify the system. A better way to do it is to ask support, when in doubt.

Usually my customers switched to ODA because they didn’t have a full-time DBA in their organization, and they wanted an easy to use solution that can be installed and upgraded easily.

The initial setup is very straightforward. As said above, you can deploy the machine in less that one day. But, as it’s an appliance, if you are not very familiar with this kind of deployment, read the docs and ask support first.

Usually, the customers I work for who chose ODA have licensed their database with the enterprise edition and they usually buy the diagnostic pack and deploy an enterprise manager cloud control to easily administer their OD platform.

We value the following features:

• Performance (we used a bare-metal configuration so I don't know about using it as a virtual environment).
• Easy management (it saves a lot of installation and patching time).

This box allowed me to consolidate the three most critical databases in one single reliable server (it is actually two nodes in our machine).

The following issues need attention:

• I would be happy to see the Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) pre-installed in it instead of installing it in a separate machine.
• The Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) is quite slow. Sometimes the page takes ages to open.
• The shutdown procedure in this box is different from many other servers that I worked with. For example, when you shut down the server, you see the LEDs of the storage part still on, and there is no button for that part to turn the power off. You can only unplug the power socket!

We have been using the solution for two years.

We didn't encounter any stability issues.

There was a little scalability issue. We noticed that the storage dedicated to the system in one node was less than the other. We therefore needed to expand it. We needed Oracle support to do that for us but it was online and streamlined.

The technical support is very good, but not excellent.

I didn't use a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward but we had issues that needed Oracle support to fix for us.

Frankly I have no clue about pricing. The organization didn't have any issue about paying for the licenses.

There is one thing that you need to be aware of. When you buy this box, you buy licenses for a specific number of CPU cores. When you set up the box, you define how many cores you want to enable. If the number of cores that you enable is different from the number of cores that you have in your license, it will be so hard to fix it (according to the Oracle representative claim but I am not sure about that.)

We evaluated RAC servers from other vendors.

The biggest disadvantage of this server is its availability when you patch the whole machine, i.e. when you patch the entire ODA firmware, not the databases within it. When you do this kind of patching, you must restart the entire server and plan for downtime.

This box has a network subnetting IP address pre-configured in it for internal communication between the nodes.

If your network has the same network subnetting IP address, you must change it in your network. This box (as of x4-2 and I don't know about the new models) doesn't allow you to change its internal subnetting IP address.