Oracle Exadata Reviews

The performance.

It makes it possible to deliver high performance Oracle OBIEE applications to our customers.

They need to reduce the cost. It needs to be a true appliance so you don’t have to manage individual components inside it. It needs to provide a better maintenance process, which means no downtime, and true rolling upgrade.

We used Oracle Exadata from 2010 to 2015.

I have deployed OEM 11g and 12c in High availability mode and was not too complicated to implement. I have not tried HA with 13c. However, installation for all the releases have been fine.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

We had some challenges on scalability. That time the only choice we had was to upgrade to a full rack from a ½ rack. However the newer version of Oracle Exadata has flexibility to upgrade. It can add database servers or storage servers not require to add ¼ or ½ racks.

6/10 - not because of people, but technology and architecture. A few times we had issue to completely fail a drive before we can replace it.

We had been using Oracle RAC on EMC disk array with Dell servers until the performance cannot really meet Oracle OBIEE application and some data warehouse applications’ performance requirement. We did look at Netezza and Datallegro, but they didn’t run the SQL that compatible with Oracle. By then Oracle Exadata seemed the only logical option for us. We also had a business reason to purchase Oracle Exadata at that time.

The initial setup was pretty smooth and straightforward.

We had Oracle team to setup the device.

The device performed very well, but the biggest challenge for us was the maintenance. Any firmware, code or OS upgrade took long time, which requires a downtime window. The rolling upgrade would even take longer so we never tried it. I heard that the new version of Exadata should be improved in this area, but we have moved off Oracle Exadata platform. The DR is another challenge since ideally you would want have to a Exadata at DR site, which in most cases is cost-inhibitive. I would say that make sure you can do rolling upgrade for minimizing the downtime, and find a cost effective DR solution especially if you use HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression).

SmartScan and Cell Offloading, which can drastically reduce I/O from queries, improving response time.

My company's data warehouse was consolidated on a single database with improved capability and performance. Maintenance tasks and jobs start to execute much faster on the new environment. Now our company is acquiring a new hardware to support our SAS application.

Massive updates statements should not disable HCC.

I've used it for over two years.

When the workload increases on the cells, Cell Offloading may not happen.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

No previous solution was used.

The setup is conducted by Oracle, which is a requirement.

We've not measured it.

It can simplify your IT environment, reducing the costs with maintenance operations if you have the Platinum offering.

We looked at Fusion I/O, but Exadata Storage was so much faster.

It really fit our mixed environment and it is totally directed to DW/DSS environment, as most of the heavy queries would be performed on the storage server.

One of the less well appreciated features of engineered systems in general, and Exadata in particular, is the speed with which a customer can get up and running. Having all components, both hardware and software, fully configured, tested, and optimised on delivery is a major customer win.

To fully appreciate this you have to consider the alternative, which is traditionally a best of breed approach, and how long this takes customers, and the effort involved in wiring everything and ensuring full interoperability between both the hardware and software components. Having experienced the issues with this approach many times in the past, the fully converged approach of engineered systems certainly saves a lot of effort.

In addition to the enhanced speed of operational readiness, the other major, but less well appreciated benefit, is one of standardisation. Many large organisations have a wide and varied oracle database, both in terms of hardware and software. A big advantage I have seen is standardisation onto the one hardware platform and a minimal number of software versions. This has improved operational effectiveness.

Several barriers to entry have been overcome with the latest X5 generation, in particular moving to more flexible sizing (elastic configurations) allows customers to choose the exact fit of compute and storage resources they require.

I've used this product for nearly 4 years now. I've used all versions of Exadata from V2, all the way up to X5. This covers 5 generations of enhancements.

Issues encountered tend to business process problems or people problems. The issues tend not to be technical.

In the earlier days of the V2 generation, and with customers pushing the then limited memory and cpu sizings available, stability was not at the levels encountered today.

With properly sized memory parameters and with the later generations of the Exadata software, stability is excellent.

Have worked on expanding racks with multi-generation racks, the promise of start small and grow over time is delivered fairly effortlessly.

Technical support can be patchy, particularly a couple of years back, the number of support personnel with exadata skills was perhaps not at the level it could have been. That being said, I have continually been impressed with the field engineers. I have encountered some who's dedication and commitment to fixing issues went way above what I would have expected.

Storage growth, and the possibility of utilising HCC to drive this down was a large driver for switching.

The initial setup and deployment of an Exadata rack is straightforward it has been well engineered to be a very quick initial setup.

The best advice is to scope upfront. Do a proper sizing exercise, get some outside assistance if you need it to get the sizing correct. If you are looking at a large deployment, consider piloting first, as you don't want to have a large amount of kit landing and then spend a long time on the migration.

I like its reliability. I like the storage cell because of the amount of RAM and memory. It has the ability to do a lot of things, so that it doesn't transfer as much data out as other systems do.

Once we went to Exadata, we started doing statistics on a weekly basis. Between the two of them, things have stabilized quite a bit; didn't need as much tuning, and so it required less DBA time to do that. DBAs were freed up to do other work.

We have a 2X. Because I don't know what the 6X does, I don't know what additional features I’d like to see them include in future releases.

It's very stable and very reliable.

I work with the PeopleSoft systems on the databases and it's doing just fine. I don't have to scale out.

I don't believe we’ve had to use technical support. We had a little bit of help at the beginning to get everything installed; after that, it just ran.

Someone in the upper management decided to spend some money, and we had the machines; he said use them.

I was allowed to help with some of the initial setup. Most of it was handled by the DBA core team; what I did was give some ideas on how we ought to do some things.

What size of database are you working with? What kind of reliability and stability do you need? Is the cost worth what they would get out of the stability.

I like the Oracle database. I find Oracle as a whole has a very stable database. As far as the Exadata is concerned, as I’ve mentioned, I didn't have a choice in the matter. Nonetheless, if given my druthers, I would stick with it because it is reliable, even though it is kind of expensive.

My rating reflects its reliability. If I was rating it just on cost, I would rate it much lower.

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 most valuable feature of the overall system is the way it is engineered. It basically gives you the best performance. The most important thing that you will see in the database, especially an Oracle database, is the latency because of IO. Because of the built-in flash, the latency is really reduced quite drastically.

We do see very good performance, at least 30% better performance in our overall response time when we use Exadata.

It's very specialized hardware. It really meets very critical needs, but it is very expensive. When I was working for another company, which was a mid-sized company, they did not even consider Exadata just because of cost. Making it more cost effective might help them.

Other than that, from a technical point of view, I can't think of any area with room for improvement.

I have been using it for one year.

I believe it's a stable solution because we haven't seen any issues, so far.

It is scalable, given the way you can add more and more Exadata to your configuration, but it gets expensive. However, I'm not the right person to comment on whether it provides enough value for the money.

I don't know too much about their support because I'm not the person who directly interacts with Oracle support on any issues. Nonetheless, one thing I learned is, for any maintenance, we have to call an Oracle technician. That's in our contract and that gets expensive. For small and mid-sized companies, that might be a factor they might want to consider.

If they are really looking for performance, and performance is the only thing that matters to them, while having a very stable system, this product is engineered within Oracle, who knows their database more than anyone else. A combination of hardware and software from the same vendor, it is specifically designed for Oracle Database, so I definitely recommend it, if it meets all their other cost and other requirements.

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.