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.  

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.

The biggest value that customers are seeing, is that it's easy to install, quick to deploy, and easy to consolidate platforms; as opposed to building an environment from scratch. When you get the ODA, all you must do is plug it in and run several commands to get it up and running. This allows for the time to deploy to be really fast. With the addition of the X6-2S, 2M and 2HA, there is a ODA platform that will suit SMB, mid-size and now large scale customer workloads.

Particularly interesting, is that now ODA 2S/M supports Standard Edition (SE2) database configurations, which is great for SMB and mid-size consolidation plays.

Moreover, the ODA X2-HA adds a new whole area for us and our customers, as it adds an all flash storage array option and virtualization capabilities; further improving consolidation densities.

The platform is primarily used for departmental mid-size companies, although I do know large companies that use it, because it’s a great platform for consolidating. It is unable to expand by much, because of the way the ODA configures when you have two nodes and X number of storage. Oracle has done a good job of letting it expand storage, but the number of nodes is still limited to two. This continues to be an issue for customers.

I have worked with ODA for the last five to six years.

It’s a very stable product. As with any other technology, in initial phases, it needed to be tested; but it has become a very solid platform with a large customer base.

The initial idea, was that ODA would be a scalable solution; allowing customers tostart with a small number of CPU’s and grow as the demand increased. As aprimarily consolidation platform, you can consolidate more, by moving move up the CPU’s as needed; pricing goes along with that too.

It’s a very solid platform. Oracle has been good at managing the support.

ODA was initially designed for setup to be easy. Once brought in-house, you plug it in, set up your network connection, run one or two commands, and then set up is complete. Even if it's in a virtualized environment, it's still easy to set up. The quick setup is the beauty and the added value that ODA brings, as opposed to other conversion or engineering systems, which take a little bit more time.

Upgrades are the same; due to its automation, many of the commands, designed by the Oracle development team, allow for easy upgrades for the entire end-to-end stack.

It's a very low-cost, simplistic solution, especially from the infrastructure side. If you have minimal staff and a mid-size environment, this is a perfect platform.

We use the solution for our Java applications. 

The product's pricing is too high. We plan to migrate to another database in three to four years. 

I have been working with the product for 20 years. 

My technicians resolve issues themselves. We do not contact the support team. 

We used IBM before and migrated to Oracle Database Application due to the costs. 

Oracle Database Application's support and maintenance are included in the contract.

I rate the product a five out of ten. 

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.

Nowadays, we migrate midsize EBS environments (EBS 11i, 12.1 and 12.2) to these machines. We use the machine as a consolidation environment and we also see a performance increase in the database layer.

Customers with limited licenses prefer this machine, as it has capacity-on-demand features which are completely aligned with Oracle licensing policies.

It is an easy-to-deploy database environment, which does not need much maintenance work. A DBA with knowledge of Oracle technologies, such as ASM and database, can manage it.

The system resources of this machine are quite enough for running midsize Oracle databases but, if there is a need, customers can expand their disk and memory resources.

This machine is also used as a standby database environment, especially for customers who have ODA HA or Exadata in their primary sites, and want to have an affordable engineered system for their standby sites.

• Capacity on Demand: Valuable because we can configure the machine according to our licenses. When there is a need, we can directly increase or decrease the CPU cores of this machine.
• NVM Express (NVMe) solid-state drives: This technology brings outstanding I/O performance for midsize databases. We have tested it by doing POCs on customer sites and the results were quite satisfying.
• Virtualization: Using the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), we can virtualize this machine and run both databases and applications on it.
• Affordable price: When we think about the technology and the features that this machine delivers, the price seems to provide a lot of value.
• Engineered system: This machine is a 1U engineered system optimized, tested and delivered by Oracle. It is a ready-to-use, easy-to-deploy environment for running Oracle products.
• Support for multiple database versions: Both 11.2.0.4 and 12c databases are supported with this machine.
• Support for multiple database editions: Both Standard edition and Enterprise edition databases are supported with this machine.
• ODA X6-2 is easy to manage: It delivers management utilities such as odacli and virt-manager (for virtualization management).

Oracle ODA is a fixed server appliance. It would be improved if it were an engineered system with scale-out capabilities.

Virtualization features could also be improved. A web-based GUI would be a good start.

Also VM-specific features, which provide VM-level fault tolerancy, could be added to this product. (This improvement would depends on the scale-out capabilities).

I have used ODA X3, X4 and X5 models for three years. This ODA X6-2M is a new ODA model and I have used it the last six months.

None.

No issues, but there is room for improvement here. Currently, there is no scale-out option for any of the models in ODA family.

Quite good. When you buy this machine it is registered with Oracle. Any service request is created using this registration. SR creation and updates are fast.

Conventional systems. Most of the time, the reasons for switching are the optimal price and the promising features.

Straightforward. The whole environment is built in one hour by following the Oracle documentation and using the related utilities.

Get benefit from the capacity-on-demand features. License your cores according to your licenses.

Standard HP servers and other members of the ODA family (such as ODA X6-2S, L and HA).

To others looking into this product I would recommend they take a look at ODA X7, which has been released.

ODA X7 delivers more system resources and it also delivers Standard Edition Oracle Database support for the HA (High Availability) model.

We value the following features:

• It is easily scalable.
• All patches (OS, DB) are bundled by Oracle, so patching dependencies are resolved.
• Oracle guarantees that the setup works if you keep up with the patches.

Setup of the server and database was easy. At a later point in time we decided to virtualize it, and the basic setup of the box was also quite easy.

The following issues need some attention:

• There is no option to combine a second ODA X2 in real application cluster mode. Therefore high availability is limited to same-cabinet RAC, and to offsite standby.
• Storage expansion was not possible for ODA X2 so we frequently ran into storage limitations.
• Even in an RAC setup it is not easy to avoid downtime because OS patching requires both nodes to be patched with very short overlapping.
• Apparently there is a way to avoid downtime, but we did not explore that option anymore because we added a remote standby.

We used the solution from 2012 to 2016.

We had some stability issues.

In the beginning, soon after initial setup and go-live, a bug caused one of the nodes to use all cores while on the other node only the requested cores where activated. This led to instability.

Also, later a hard disk caused instability while it was "dying".

We had an issue with scalability, but only in terms of storage.

Technical support was excellent.

We didn't use a previous solution. This solution was recommended by a consulting company because of ease of scalability and patching.

Initial setup was easy.

Pricing was reasonable given the high quality hardware parts used and the high availability.

I was not involved in evaluation of alternative solutions.

The ODA is a great server solution for mid-size companies but be aware of the limitations when it comes to real application cluster.

Also, make sure the solution provides enough disk storage for the life time of the product.

We primarily use the solution as an operational system.

The performance of the system is the solution's most valuable aspect. In combination with the database, it gives perfect results. It's a better system than using other kinds of integrated systems. In general, the ODA control is much simpler to use and offers up the best performance.

Technical support could be much better. The maintenance for an enterprise system isn't so great. It's also much expensive.

A future release should improve the availability of networking interfaces.

Hardware expansions availability should be in-line with product support. 

The solution should have the ability to offer an integrated management dashboard with virtualized systems and oracle DB manager in all DB supported versions.

The machine should have a visual monitoring interface, not also for hardware but also to DB and virtualized hosts.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues over the past two years.

We're not too pleased with technical support. The cost to have access to them is way too much money.

The initial setup was fairly quick. It was easy to deploy.

The pricing of the solution is fair but the technical support pricing is quite high.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's a very good system.