Oracle Exadata Reviews

The solution offloads the storage. This gives us great performance without impacting the CPU.

We have improved the average response time between 36% and 85%, depending on the database after migrating to Exadata.

We have been using this for 18 months.

There were no deployment issues. However, the process of configuring with OEDA requires a lot of information beforehand.

We only had a few stability issues with unexpected reboots.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is very good.

Exadata has great value. The storage CPUs do not count on the Oracle Database licenses.

If you are acquiring a larger configuration, I would advise you to consider getting two smaller ones, so you can:

• Get more memory
• Get additional, separate environments if required by your scenario. (You cannot virtualize OS on Exadata.)

Maybe you should not license every Oracle product if you do not need them on every database.

Usually, the I/O operation is a more intensive and costly one. In any transaction processing, the I/O is a more expensive operation due to storage and better performance. That's where most of the latency and time would be spent in overall flow. Exadata has an additional service and computing power at the storage level as well which reduces this latency. Usually it's available only on the high-end machines.

Exadata as a platform is a complete solution, where you have CPU memory with an additional server and inter-cell storage. That's the beauty of Exadata; IOPS and good overall latency and that's why we like it. We use it for the transaction processing, especially for production.

In terms of improvement, related to other products when we were running down the physical servers, we ran into some issues. We are always on the latest stack so at this point of time we are self-sufficient. Once we deployed Exadata, we never had to look back, at least in recent times.

One improvement would be the limitation on the storage. For example, when we buy with a double or triple CN, it comes with some storage. Once we reach that point, we don't have any other option. This was in the old version. We don't know how it is improved in the current version; maybe there is a way to optimize it and we can have additional storage allocated. In the earlier versions, we didn't have this possibility and we need to upgrade to a later version of Exadata to get more storage.

I have used this product for more than 4 or 5 years.

It's a stable solution but it comes with a price. You get performance and there is a cost associated with the performance. The Exadata tool is best when you can afford. You get best quality, in terms of the overall product features.

It depends on each case, your use and the company. For us, it is scalable and working for our use.

For me, what we have right now is scalable and it is serving our purpose.

They have a dedicated team exclusively for Exadata. Whenever we ran into some issues with the tool, they nailed it down. The support was good in Oracle because this is a prestigious product from Oracle. They have their support model.

Offloading is the most valuable feature of Exadata.

It integrates well with our other products.

• Conservation
• Performance

There are little things that need fine tuning, such as storage.

It’s also missing some features that you would expect from a data warehousing tool, such as snapshots.

It is stable.

It scales well for our needs.

Technical support is good.

We also looked at Teradata, but Exadata is perfect.

Definitely take some courses on Clusterware, ASM, Real Application Clusters; those kinds of courses, advanced courses.

A valuable feature is that everything goes into one machine; Oracle and the applications, so that is a big advantage.

Sometimes, I don't see any difference between Linux servers and the Oracle ones.

We have only used this product for 3 years so I cannot say what exactly needs improvement.

See my Technical Support answer below.

I have been using this product for about 3 years.

It is stable. Sometimes we need to do patching and they take the system down. For example, we did patching a couple of weeks ago and they took the system down. They said it's the OS patching although they did not inform us beforehand. They just went ahead and did it.

That's one thing about Exadata: Sometimes when there are errors, they have do the patching. We cannot just do it ourselves.

The product is scalable.

In my management, I have no say as what to buy. I'm just doing the work. They keep buying it, so we have to keep supporting it.

The technical support is terrible. When I search on Google, I get more answers than from the Oracle support team. For example, when we reach out to Oracle and claim something is not working like we cannot get OEM to connect from the Exadata machine. I simply searched on Google and found the answer. The Oracle support team could not find the solution for 3-4 weeks. Finally, I searched on Google and I found the answer in less than 1 hour. The issue was that 1 of the files had no permission for OEM to connect. That's it. Google is good. I can search anything on Google, not Oracle support.

As a DBA, we usually use it for the database upgrade which is straightforward. For the OS upgrade, it's mainly up to the Oracle support and the platform support to carry out the upgrade. We don't do it. We're even afraid to install any third-party/ other vendor's application on it, as it may be harmful.

One thing that's good is that everything is into one machine; the database and the application that we are using. Oracle cannot blame the third-party vendor. It's an OEM problem, so Oracle itself needs to support this product. That's the only advantage that I see. Oracle loves to blame somebody else for their issues. That’s why I am not keen on this product.

I use a lot of Linux servers and they all do the same thing.

The best features are its robustness, stability, and performance.

Actually, I'm using the old version. The latest version is already out with all a lot of new features; so what I’m looking for is already there in that. Once we start using the new one, then we can come to know what additions we can put in.

It seems very stable.

Scalability is good.

Technical support is awesome. Oracle is our technical support; so when we need it, they are there.

Initial setup is complex. You need Oracle technical support to do your initial setup.

I would certainly say if you're looking for something scalable or diverse, this is the solution.

The following features of Exadata are the most valuable to me:

• Cell offloading
• Smart Scan
• Flash Cache
• Infiniband Fabric
• IO Resource Manager
• Hybrid Columnar Compression
• Storage Indexes

The Exadata database machine is a perfect solution to cater to the needs of large data warehouses. It aptly addresses the problems of database consolidation and marks an end to the argument of running mixed workloads together. With Exadata, we were not only able to consolidate our large data warehouses in a single machine, but we also stabilized the peak workloads. The throughput issues simply vanished with the features like Flash Cache and Infiniband Network Fabric.

On the operational fronts, Exadata streamlines the tasks and responsibilities in a distinctive manner across the levels of an enterprise IT structure. Solution architects act as machine administrators and make sure that the machine is being used in optimal way. At the same time, database administrators, being the familiar heads, don't find much change in roles. Overall, Exadata justifies the total cost of ownership (TCO) by balancing the capital and operational expenses - thereby achieving a higher ROI.

Starting from Exadata X5, virtualization is supported. The feature, though, for some reason, is not much talked about. If Oracle starts promoting OVM and VMWare on Exadata through white papers and case studies, I'm sure it will enable new IT setups in practice. For instance, virtualization support can enable ETL nodes to be resident with Exadata.

I have been using this solution since 2012 (four years).

I did not encounter any issues with deployment.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues either.

I rate customer service 8/10.

I rate it 8/10. My experience with Oracle Support has been moderate. Many times, I find support engineers working on an SR seem to be in a hurry to change the status to 'customer working'. In the past, I've asked them to understand the issue over a call (rather than adding updates) and then suggest the solution.

A vendor team with good expertise implemented the solution.

Find the appropriate workload for the machine. Looking at the data sheet, Exadata is a beast meant to solve bigger problems. You will not be able to gauge its benefits with nuggets of data.

The most valuable feature is definitely the performance. However, it's also a platform for both performance and consolidation. Once you start leveraging Exadata with Database In-Memory and Multitenant, you've got a really solid platform for database enterprise computing.

If you have server footprint reduction or consolidation as a requirement, then you can consolidate several databases and configurations onto one platform. Combine that with performance, it becomes a great avenue for cost reduction in terms of OpEx and CapEx. Exadata cannot be one-dimensional solution, performance, consolidation, and scalability must be part of the overall solution.

I think Oracle Enterprise Manager has come a long way with monitoring and managing Exadata, but getting the patching down would go a long way. I think the patching is still lacking quite a bit. If we can get the patching and upgrade in place, that would make a huge impact in overall supportability. I realize there is new OEM functionality recently introduced to support this, but it needs to be flushed out and tested.

It's been great. The stability has really, really improved a lot over the last couple of years.

It's been fantastic. With all the additional flash, with the faster CPUs, the faster disks, it's really come a long ways. The introduction of the X6 is also going to be an interesting avenue.

Tech support has been really good. That goes a long way because you have some comfort, stability in the fact that you've got somebody that you can lean on. You don't always have those skill sets. Since we're a services company, we do have those skill sets in that area, but most customers may not have that.

These guys are very well versed in the technology. They understand not only the storage software part of it, but the database as well as the hardware aspect of it -end to end. The most surprising aspect of Exadata is really the support.

It is quite difficult, but again since we're a services company, we're pretty well versed in it. We actually help customers do that end-to-end. Not only do we help bring Exadata in, we help do the installation and configuration and migration to the Exadata, as well as sustainability for future.

It takes a lot of planning depending on your downtime for conversion, depending where [platform] you're coming from. All those things play a big part in what tools you use and how you use them.

It is an expensive stack, so there's those things to keep in mind. The upside is that once you've bought into the technology, you have to embrace it , if that's the direction you want to go.

It is really good for what it's supposed to do. It's a great technology for Oracle-based solutions. There's pluses and minuses in everything. Any time you get an engineered system like that, you have to be geared for organizational [boundary] changes. Understand how the technology is supposed to work, how it's going to change the way you do your day-to-day business.

My primary use case of this solution is running the large database status regarding applications.

The cost of the product could be improved.

I have been using this solution for around ten years.

This is a very stable solution, which we have hardly any problems with.

The tech support for this product is fine, though sometimes they take some time to identify and rectify issues.

The installation took around one month.

We installed the database using an in-house team but Oracle prefers to do the box configuration themselves.

I would recommend this solution, particularly if you are running Oracle databases. I would rate this solution as an 8 out of 10.