Oracle Exadata Reviews

We use Oracle Exadata to provide data for our analytics in our BI systems. It can be, BI, Tableau, or batch queries. It's a Russian system called 1C and we developed ETL procedures for Oracle Exadata. We don't use any ETL instruments. We only made some packages and control mechanisms that provide us to upload data into the aggregate tables and other usages.

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the smart scan. We have large TB sessions of approximately 100 per second for each of our three instances. The smart scan allows us the obtain data in time in the enterprise manager.

The solution overall is a complete system.

Oracle Exadata could improve the monitoring system in the enterprise manager, it could be more user-friendly. In most Oracle tools there is a lot of functionality, and sometimes you need to do five or six clicks to find metrics, and sometimes it's a waste of time.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for approximately four years.

Oracle Exadata is the most stable system I have used. The performance is very good.

Oracle Exadata is highly scalable. To scale the solution you contact Oracle for the scalability you want, they give you the details, and you set it up.

We have more than 100 people using this solution in my company.

We do not plan to increase our usage because here in Russia we have some restrictions and we will have to move on without it.

We have used the support from Oracle and it is very good.

I rate the support from Oracle Exadata a five out of five.

Positive

I have used other solutions, such as PostgreSQL, Amazon, and Microsoft. The features that Oracle Exadata has these other solutions do not, such as smart scan or monitoring. If we were to have the same performance as Oracle Exadata, we would have to have more hardware.

The initial setup of Oracle Exadata is very complex. It has steps that need someone with qualifications to be completed.

The price of Oracle Exadata is competitive. There are some features that are outside of the initial purchase license, such as some monitoring packages.

I rate the price of Oracle Exadata a four out of five.

We have DBA administrators that do the maintenance of this solution.

My advice to others is to take courses in Oracle database, Oracle Exadata administration, and other development guides. They need to know how to use the solution before they start.

I rate Oracle Exadata a nine out of ten.

Primarily OLTP but report is done against a combination of Materialized Views and transactional tables.

We have a number of statistics collected before cutover on our legacy environment compared to Exadata. Without doing anything other than copying the data across, we saw significant performance gains for most key processes. We receive feedback from users stating how fast the performance is compared to other systems. Performance issues are few and far between. Our database environment is extremely stable compared to the legacy DB configuration. We upgraded from a X2-2 quarter rack to a X5-2 eighth rack and experienced significant performance gains. We recently performed another technology refresh to a X7-2 so obviously, we've been very pleased with the initial investment. For this deployment, we decided to virtualize the Exadata configuration, providing some additional flexibility to our operational environment.

We primarily run OLTP with some reporting. With that being said, the feature that provides us the most performance gains is the Smart Flash Cache for the OLTP databases. The "offloading" capabilities provide the biggest performance gains for Reporting such as smart scans and storage indexes. There is a new security feature which allows disabling ssh to the storage servers which will make my security folks very happy. Also, there is a STIG script for hardening storage servers and Database Nodes which can be implemented as a report only or actually implement security settings. Would advise running report first to assess the results and then manually modify, as needed.

My biggest gripe has been patches which has dramatically improved since our initial Exadata was delivered (January 2011). The only issues we periodically experience are with non-default RPMs on the database nodes. These may fail during the pre-req check which means opening a SR with support. This has become the exception, not the norm so overall not much to complain about. The X2-2 used to experience frequent disk failures but now, that is a thing of the past. 

eleven years

There is redundancy built throughout the Exadata so even when we've experienced a disk failure, it's a very low stress situation. Early on we had some performance issues with DBFS and a node eviction problem. DBFS was resolved through a combination of settings changes and a quarterly patch. The node eviction was resolved through a one-off patch that eventually got rolled into a quarterly patch. I would chalk up these issues to being early adopters. We do have an occasional bug but I can't think of any that would be unique to Exadata with the database software. At least this provides some degree of comfort that Exadata is not the source of the issue.

The key for scalability is selecting the appropriate disk configuration and the proper size rack configuration. The two options are High Capacity and High Performance. If ever in doubt, always go with High Capacity. The performance difference is negligible at best, however having the extra space allows for more consolidation. That's the entire point of Exadata, to consolidate databases. We've added a few databases to the Exadata since we originally started to use the environment and there has been no performance impact. In our case, a Quarter rack was appropriate but for larger environments, this may not be enough.

Customer Service:

In terms of overall Oracle customer service, we've had good experiences on this front. Oracle has provided us access to their experts and continually check to see how things are going. Whenever an issue comes up, they treat the problem seriously. Since we support a government customer, Oracle is extra motivated to ensuring we have a successful experience. Since 2011, there have been significant improvements with support. Occasionally we do hit issues which it seemingly takes support a longer period of time to provide a patch or workaround but these namely involve additional features, not core technology so it's a matter of exhibiting patience.

Technical Support:

On the hardware side, customer service is quite good. Any disk failures get replaced in a day and with triple redundancy for disk, it's not been a concern. Software customer service has improved over the years. Early on was a little rough as I will say the software wasn't fully mature. As the product has matured, so has the software support's capability to resolve issues more quickly. We can't take advantage of ASR, however this seems like a major improvement for customer service in terms of responsiveness.

We didn't switch, we were doing a technology refresh and went with Exadata instead of building out our own Oracle RAC configuration. We previously had a combination of Dell servers, Red Had Linux OS, Oracle Cluster File System on EMC Storage with Juniper switches. This configuration had lots of performance issues, node evictions, and constant headaches. Since moving to Exadata, all those pain points went away.

There is a definite learning curve initially. We had to learn about migration options, shared mount point options, how to integrate with Cloud Control, patching, health check, how to optimize, and how to harden the Exadata environment. Since we went live, many more folks use Exadata so there's more how to's and best practice documents available so the learning curve isn't nearly as steep. We learned a lot in the process and now have a tremendous amount of expertise in setting up, configuring, optimizing and maintaining the Exadata.

We implement Exadata in-house and have gone through several migration methodologies.

We had ACS perform the initial Startup Pack, however there are companies that can do this much cheaper to lower the original setup cost, such as ours. Day-to-day cost is greatly reduced compared to our legacy environment as we no longer have to serve as "fire fighters." In terms of pricing, Exadata is probably not going to be the lowest cost option. There is a price to pay for performance and stability. With that being said, I have not heard of any customers who have regretted the purchase and/or looking to get off the technology. On the contrary, I can't imagine going to another solution at this point and trying to justify this with the user community in terms of why the system performance degraded. Can't imagine that would go over too well.

We had a custom solution and evaluated Exadata versus the custom solution. Exadata was actually a cheaper solution due to the number of cores. Oracle software licenses are based on processor so if comparing a Quarter Rack versus a 4+ four node custom solution, Exadata may win out from this perspective. We were looking at a 5 node RAC which would have doubled the cost of our software licenses when compared to the equivalent with a Quarter rack of Exadata. Besides, the performance metrics indicated Exadata would easily outperform the custom solution which made our decision a no brainer.

Exadata is a powerful solution. As I mentioned there is a learning curve. Working with a company that has experience with Exadata can help avoid potential pain points and maximize the ROI.

My company uses Oracle Exadata for operational databases. It's for implementing pension, security, and life insurance.

My company is data-heavy. It's a data-oriented company, and Oracle Exadata enables it to perform many calculations and data processing in real time, which would otherwise be difficult.

What I found most valuable in Oracle Exadata is its newer technology that gives better performance. It has more recent hardware and significant changes in the architecture, so it's better than older solutions.

I'm satisfied with Oracle Exadata because it now has ten out of ten memory, which makes its overall performance much better than previous versions.

Oracle Exadata has room for improvement in pricing, especially for smaller companies. The solution is okay for bigger companies, but for smaller companies, it isn't because it adds higher than usual extra hardware costs. If Oracle wants to reach more small-scale businesses, it should improve on Oracle Exadata pricing.

We've been using Oracle Exadata for ten years.

The stability of Oracle Exadata is excellent. I don't hear complaints about its stability, so it's a nine out of ten.

This new version of Oracle Exadata has improved scalability, which I find incredible. Its scalability is nine out of ten.

My company uses advanced Oracle Exadata technical support. The support is excellent, so I'd rate it as nine out of ten. It's a long-term cooperation where my team knows the experts by name, and the support team is always available for my company. The service is excellent.

Positive

Ten years ago, my company migrated from IBM Db2 to Oracle Exadata because, upon calculation, Oracle Exadata is more beneficial from an economic point of view than IBM Db2.

My company was on some mainframe legacy software and IBM Db2, and it had many problems, so it decided to switch to Oracle Exadata. That was more of a platform-related migration than a database-related migration. My company made the right decision to move to Oracle Exadata.

The initial setup for Oracle Exadata was quite complex, so it's a six out of ten for me.

Deploying Oracle Exadata took several hours. I organized it in advance, so I was well prepared for it. I had to migrate from the previous hardware to the new hardware or appliance, and the organization in both databases was different, so the task could have been more straightforward. You need to know what you're doing to deploy Oracle Exadata successfully.

I deployed Oracle Exadata with the help of company experts and Oracle experts. It would be best to have Oracle experts for more delicate maintenance tasks or upgrades.

There's ROI from Oracle Exadata. My company saves one hundred percent using Oracle Exadata versus Oracle database licensed on different hardware.

It also depends on what you compare. My company uses Oracle solutions, so the Oracle database has many advantages for my company. For example, the company has a no-code generator software that uses the Oracle database, so the Oracle database is an essential part of the environment.

Comparing Oracle Exadata against non-Exadata, using Oracle Exadata is wiser for my company because it's cheaper to have Oracle Exadata than not because the company has to buy additional licenses and courses, which would be more expensive.

Oracle Exadata is costly. Its licensing should also be more versatile. Smaller companies would benefit if Oracle Exadata had lower pricing.

Pricing for a solution should be justified, so you must make several calculations to evaluate the price correctly. Oracle Exadata adds costs on the hardware which you wouldn't otherwise have. Still, when you go with the solution, it offloads some of the database processing on the processors, so you don't need a license for database use, and it uploads it to store sales. It means that when you do data processing intensively, or you're processing large data sets, the database will be offloaded to the storage CPU, which means that Oracle Exadata gives you free database processing, so at some point, Oracle Exadata becomes cheaper versus licensing the database and running it on your server or in the cloud.

This is when you need to carefully calculate and see if Oracle Exadata is the right choice for your company. I wouldn't give it a very high rating in terms of affordability, but it still depends. For my company, for example, it's cheaper to use Oracle Exadata than use Oracle database without Oracle Exadata. It depends on the customer. It's up to you to calculate. I'd give the solution a five out of ten for affordability because it's not cheap.

My company pays for Oracle Exadata licenses according to need. For example, my company uses a real-time cluster and has possible configurations that require licensing for the database, though that's quite modest. My company isn't huge, so the environment isn't large.

My company uses the latest version of Oracle Exadata.

Maintaining Oracle Exadata requires one main DBA involved with the maintenance, and one backup, where the backup takes care of limited tasks involving storage, network, etc. My company also works with an on-call service as needed. It's not a continuous service or a service you use regularly. My company only calls when it's necessary. For example, if there's an event or incident in the production environment or a major maintenance task, such as an Oracle Exadata upgrade. My company also has some people involved when there's a change in the environment, or it needs help with the infrastructure.

Internally, my company has around one thousand Oracle Exadata users, but externally, that number is more than one hundred thousand. There's no plan to increase its usage because the company has slow internal growth, but the growth rate is average externally. All people within my company use Oracle Exadata.

My rating for Oracle Exadata is nine out of ten, though it would still depend on the customer. Some customers may not need the solution for their environment, but for me, I'd rate it a nine.

My company is an Oracle Exadata customer.

We are using Oracle Exadata as a warehouse for historical reporting to provide the historical data that can be utilized by Power BI for reporting.

This solution meets all of my expectations.

The performance of the data is the most important part. It's quite good, and the security features are also quite good.

The management monitoring tools are quite important and an area that needs some improvement. The monitoring or consoles that are available should be available across the platform, and not only seen when logging onto the server.

The availability of the monitoring should be responsive and available all of the time.

I am planning to switch from Oracle Exadata to one of Microsoft's solutions, such as Synapse Analytics, to improve the performance. 

We have our Power BI and other parts in the cloud. 

The Exadata, being on-premises, creates problems at times because of the gateway.

I recommend that Oracle come up with connectors that can be utilized by Oracle Exadata to convert the data that we have in Oracle to MySQL. We can extend the reach of Exadata to other toolsets.

I have been working with Oracle Exadata for three years.

It's stable and I have not experienced any issues.

This solution is scalable.

I have been working with Oracle support for the last 15 years. I have no issues with support.

The initial setup was done by my infrastructure team and I don't think that they found any difficulty in it. They are knowledgeable in Oracle, so they didn't have any problems.

We are okay with the licensing, as it's not much. Oracle is always costly but it's fine.

The ecosystem that we have in our company is majorly Microsoft-based. When I refer to power BI or other integrated tools, they are by Microsoft.

I would certainly recommend using Oracle. They have their cloud applications and I would say that it is not a good idea to go with an on-premises deployment. My suggestion is that people go with OCI instead.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

You have to contact Oracle to make any changes and identify any issues. If you own the product, you may have to hire somebody who understands the product.

The performance could be improved.

This solution is deployed hybrid cloud.

There are a lot of performance-related issues that I have encountered with Oracle Exadata. You need someone with the expertise to make changes and recommend completing daily exercises for better performance.

It is a scalable solution, and I rate it an eight out of ten.

I have not contacted technical support before.

The setup requires proper security groups if you want to use it. I rate the setup an eight out of ten. Most of the users we've worked with use Oracle Exadata, but we've worked with major banks which prefer to own the solution for security purposes.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. Regarding advice, if you're scaling performance-wise or writing something on Oracle Exadata, you should understand how the performance works. You should also understand the cost of what the query is going to be and know the scalability.

It's pretty simple in my opinion. It's called out the box, and it's called support. Sometimes with the engineered systems based on the support agreement that you have with the vendor, sometimes you hear about problems with your system from them rather than your applications experiencing some issues, and you're having to log a support ticket with Oracle. I think that's huge.

The thing that attracts them to the two products but mainly the Exadata is the storage technology is revolutionary whether it's the only solution of that flavor on the market or not, I'm not familiar with. It's the storage solution, it's the speed, and it's the high availability. If somebody wants 5 or 6 9s worth of availability, a very good place for them to be is with one of Oracles engineered system solutions.

As is always the case with Oracle, when some late-breaking fancy technology gets under their radar, self-invented or perhaps something that they're picking up that they'd like to compete with from another vendor, they're all over it. I can't specifically think of anything myself. Outside I guess of speed and maybe the other two things I could think of are speed and speed, but I'm not suggesting that speed is an enhancement because there's anything wrong with the speed of the system now, but of course we always like to do things in four nanoseconds rather than seven.

I think I would probably give it a capital S. People here peripherally hear about informational stuff that may be going on in the cluster, but as far as catastrophic events that may happen with the cluster, a lot of them in some way, shape or form are not far from self-healing. I think that's a huge advantage of an engineered system.

If you buy a quarter rack, you feel like you need more computing power, you upgrade to a half rack. You go to a 3/4 or a full rack. It's basically I guess we used to call it plug and play except a lot of us found it in the olden days, it was plug and pray. I think they've got that one licked to the max.

Sometimes it's them calling us on behalf of one of our clients, but I would find that once one figures out the best way to work with their support organization in general, but their engineered systems support organization in particular, I can't think anything outside of a world class organization. I would admit that I don't have a lot, if any, experience with the competition, but I don't feel like I need any experience with the competition because of the way they do support those two products.

A lot of the times it ends up being complaints from the user community, and difficulty with strategic activities that the system performs. If you're running a commercial off the shelf application against these engineered system, sometimes it's a little more complex to work with a third party vendor, to speed things up. Mainly it's complaints from the user community. You and I both know that if something takes four seconds all the time and takes seven seconds some of the time, all the people are going to remember is the seven seconds.

I haven't done it on a hands-on basis, but I believe that what I mentioned at the beginning about out of the box is just that. Oracle from my recollection first tried to venture into some form of engineered system in the '90s with HP. It was a red box that you basically took out of the carton and plugged in. I think that's pretty much close to what once you brought it onto the network, exactly what you're going to do with their systems, so I thinks it's plug and play.

Choosing a vendor: obviously cost, high availability, and the strength of the rack technology. It's a corner of the Oracle technology that basically not exactly gets reinvented, but the new features and the new ways of going about to do things and the capabilities of failover and all that is a huge concentration as the product matures, not that it is immature. I think that's a primary reason that people might consider looking at this. There's absolutely no doubt, it's not far from an upgrade basically being done on the fly. There's so many things that can be done online. The plague of course of the '90s and the early-2000s was downtime.

Rating: I'd call it about a 12 out of 10. Of course you have to be able to afford the box. You have to be able to afford the configuration that you're going to be getting into. It's cost-effective for a lot of organizations, but I would rate the technology very high. Some of the specialized mechanisms that Oracle has put in place, especially with respect to Exadata and the late-breaking version of Exadata in particular.

As I said before, I'm not intimately or even somewhat peripherally familiar with the competition, but these guys know what they're doing, and my experience has been in the past that if Oracle ever plays catch-up in a technology spectrum with the competition, watch out. We all know that it's now cheap. It's affordable for a lot of organizations. If cost is going to be something, it's going to ultimately drive an organization's buy or no buy decision. The benefit after the money is spent and an ongoing outflow of cash to the vendor, if it makes business sense for somebody, I don't think they can be in a better place.

Make sure it's the right solution. Make sure that you do indeed need their real application cluster solution, which we affectionately call rack. Make sure it's right for you. It sounds corny, and it's sounds like a cliché, but it applied when I got started in IT in the 1800s, and it still applies. If it's cost-effective, go for it.

Oracle Exadata provides very good performance and reliability. It's a highly reliable system and provides maximum performance.

The business outcomes are much faster; end users are very happy so they can focus on their day-to-day work rather than waiting for the computer, the response from the system. In many customer cases, reports that used to take 10-12 hours get completed in 1-2 hours, a massive reduction. A business cycle that used to take about 3-5 days to turn around can be turned around in 1 day, so that's where we optimize our business utilization; much more efficiency.

A major concern from customers is that it's very costly, but if they think about the total cost of ownership over 3-5 years, I think the total cost attests to the business readiness and it doesn't come out to be very costly.

Exadata is pretty stable. There are built-in high-availability features. For example, every component – including the power supply, the fan, the CPU, and the memory – is redundant; you're buying a highly available system.

It absolutely scales to our customers’ needs. You can start with a two-node configuration, and you can go as high as eight racks, I believe, connected together with eight nodes, so you can scale up to 64. That number might have changed recently. You can scale it very well.

Technical support is fantastic. Oracle supports Exadata customers as the top tier, and you get support when you need it. Oracle has separate Exadata support. Once you buy Exadata, you go to that dedicated team and the turnaround is very, very good.

Initial setup is complicated and you need to engage Oracle to do that. Obviously, nobody else can do that. It's complicated, but it's a part of the process.

It's a very good product. I think if you have a business use and can justify the cost, go and buy it. You'll never regret it.

The most valuable feature would be Smart Scan because it gives us the ability to perform a large amount of processing on the storage side, cutting down on I/O tremendously. That's one of the big features that really drew us into jumping on Exadata.

We also like having the ability to have a lot of flash storage where a lot of our data can be in-memory, which speeds up transactions and processing.

As with any organization, before we embark on anything, we have to look at the ROI as well as the ability of a particular tool. Exadata helps us to consolidate and manage our databases as one with much faster processing. This, of course, is the key in speeding up our ability to do work and provide customer service. We're a mutual fund company, so speed is really key in providing satisfactory customer service. Exadata really gives us the key factors from an IT perspective, which are performance and availability.

There's a lot with Exadata that can be done on a black-box level which depends entirely on what the vendor is able to do for you, which is good from a certain perspective. But we hope, as this technology matures, Oracle allows customers to have a little more hands-on customization of some certain elements to better suit their environments. So we're looking forward to the ability to do greater customizations to suit our business needs.

Deployment wasn't difficult and we had no issues with it. Oracle had a bad rap in the past with customers who had bigger systems. They didn't provide them with enough assistance in order to assimilate new products and tools. But now, they've done a pretty good job of creating a very thorough cookbook, which has helped a lot with issues they we and my peers at other companies have had. Some of the issues was in the way we set up our enterprises which made it difficult to bring in and assimilate new products, but Oracle has lately done a good job of smoothing that out.

Exadata has been a very stable product once configured properly. We've had no issues with instability.

It's scaled to our needs.

We have premier-level technical support, so we have a pretty good relationship with them.

I would describe the initial setup as being of medium complexity. We're a financial insurance company, so we always want to put in a lot of rigor, in terms of security and compliance. At times, it's not our own fault, but it's our devices, but at the same time, the price of being exploited is bigger than what it takes to ensure security and compliance. The issue has been really more of the rigor that we put in ourselves, and finding a way to allow those new products and solutions to work as they were expected through our hardening that we've done on our environment.

We want to stay at the front of the cutting edge, and we evaluate and realize that the benefit, the return on investment that Exadata brings for a company of our magnitude and size, is tremendous. We've exploited Exadata, and it's performed very well for us.