Oracle Exadata Reviews

We used to work on business intelligence projects, so we really enjoyed the service-like performance.  It's been great.

The business intelligence is very good.

We have found that the analytics environment is excellent.

We've discovered that the solution is quite a complex product, which can make it difficult to sell. Snowflake, for example, is simpler and therefore an easy sell.

The customization can sometimes be difficult to achieve.

We've been working with the solution for a very long time. It's been more than 15 years personally and at least 15 years at this company, so it's been well over a decade at this point.

We don't deal with bugs or glitches and the product doesn't crash or freeze. The only real issues we come across are related to customization. It's quite stable. We haven't had problems.

We have about 100 people using the product currently.

Our clients are quite sizeable companies.

I've never used technical support and therefore can't really comment on their responsiveness or level of knowledge. I have an internal team that assists with troubleshooting as necessary.

As a consultancy, we work with a variety of products. This includes Oracle and Snowflake, for example.

We are an integrator of the solution. Our clients are sizeable companies, and there are several providers involved in different projects with Exadata. We're not the only administrators. 

I personally haven't handled an installation. We're mostly focused on projects related to BI and analytics. Someone else handles the setup and we just use the product or have our clients use it. I don't have a sense of whether the implementation is difficult or complex or how long deployments take.

We are a consultancy. We are partners with Oracle, with Snowflake, and with other vendors, software vendors.

We work in different deployment models with our customers. We try to fit our customers' needs. It depends on the customer and the project in terms of which deployment model we'll recommend or use.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. It's very good. We've had a great experience using it over the years.

The most valuable feature is definitely the storage offload; the fact that, as you're executing your SQL, it's segregated out to a storage device, and the database itself doesn't have to take that overhead. We've noticed a huge improvement in execution.

It has definitely improved my organization, because it's an engineered solution. It's not pieces and parts from different vendors. Having the one-vendor solution that's fully supported by Oracle, it doesn't require us to have the number of staff that it used to in a more distributed environment. We've definitely got some efficiencies from a staffing model because of it.

I'd like to see them improve more of the reporting capabilities of Enterprise Manager for the Exadata plug-in.

It's definitely been stable for us; over a four-year period, we had zero outages. It's been rock solid.

We’ve had experience scaling it. We started out originally with an X2, the second release of Exadata. A year ago, we expanded that with the new X5. We were able to take our existing procurement and expand it with newer hardware too.

We definitely have noticed that technical support has gone down, unfortunately. The quality of support; it takes a lot longer to get tickets resolved than it did four years ago, when we first bought the Exadata. We're an engineered systems customer. That's supposed to have more platinum-level support model to it. We have not experienced that recently.

It was end of life for our previous hardware. We had to buy something. The Exadata just seemed to be a better solution.

Initial setup was very simple, actually. Getting all of the right network information was really the critical path for it, but once that was done, the actual install and configuration was very simple.

The replacement hardware was ironically Sun. Because Oracle procured Sun, they just became our natural progression.

When I’m choosing a vendor to work with, I look at the reliability of the actual hardware solution itself and then also the support. Even though tech support has not been very good for us, our Oracle reps have stayed with us and want us to be successful. They help us try and navigate the Oracle waters.

Know what versions of hardware are out there, for any type of an engineered solution. Understand where there might not be redundancy in the solution, to know if that's going to meet your needs or not.

I have not given it a perfect rating because I probably wouldn't give anyone a perfect rating. It's met all of our expectations.

The tool's performance is good. 

The solution's pricing is very high. 

I have been using the tool for four years. 

I would rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. Certain companies in my organization use the solution like the marketing, IT, and analytics departments. 

The product's setup takes around two to three days to complete. 

We rely on the local vendor company to help us with the installation. 

I would rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. 

The number one feature is the speed; it's InfiniBand. We're serving almost 3.2 million people; it's an eligibility system. We add on 80 TB of data that needs to be churned and processed. Previously, we used Sun Solaris, and then we moved to a Windows platform. It was really bad. We started the load on Tuesday, and sometime around noon on Wednesday it finished. Sometimes, it would crash. Right now, it all finishes within 4.5-5 hours. If it starts at 6 o’clock, it’s done by 9 o’clock. That is one big advantage we see.

The standard Oracle things that we have, such as compression, are also valuable.
Now, all of our development to pre-production – everything – is in one single rack, which is easier for us to do. Production is on another full rack. That's what we use it for.

Pretty much whatever we need from the database side, it is there. There are specific things from the application side. I do not have a list; they do have a list of what you can't see from the database side. Pretty much what we are looking for is part of the 12c that is coming out. Most developers are used to Microsoft .NET and SQL Server. We are all cutting out Oracle, so there is a shift within the developer's mind; how am I going to use it; starting from the modeling to how to use it; key items; for example, I need to have a temporary table to create a gdd; there's an identity column in SQL that automatically fills in, and it used to have triggers.

The 12c is coming. There are some good features coming that I'm looking for. At a conference earlier this year, I was part of the session on what is new in 12c. I'm really excited about that.

We're doing real-time analytics, so one other thing is whether NoSQL is the best fit or not. We need to evaluate that, which we have not done yet. Pretty much, we are thinking that we have Exadata, so we want to use that product.

I have been using it for 3.5-4 years.

It is absolutely a stable solution. After we moved to Exadata, the stability has been good. Number one is, we used to go through Microsoft patching every month. With Exadata and Linux, we only have to do the firmware once per quarter. We try to coordinate that with quarterly Oracle patches. It isn’t really required; we only do it because we are behind two firewalls. We don't have to apply all the patches.

It is absolutely scalable. We have five enterprise applications of our own. They're all public-facing systems. Going back to the performance, on any given day, anywhere between 5,000-8,000 internal people use it, and we do have a public-facing system. People apply for benefits, and it's entirely public, so they can use it. Compared to our previous system, if you look at the performance metrics, some of them show almost 30-40% improvement. Some of the batches are almost 70% improvement.

If you look at the backend side – logical export backups, RMANs, and disaster recovery; all of those things – there is a tremendous increase.

Technical support is pretty good. There are certain areas specific to the enterprise application where we might not be getting Oracle support. But for Oracle products, it is pretty good.

We brought Oracle in to set it up, so it still is with Oracle. We didn't go through the entire setup process because Oracle was part of it. Oracle itself did it, so it was pretty easy for us. Again, one good thing is, we don't have to really worry about the patching, OS levels, and other stuff. It is pretty easy for us.

There are still a few issues that we are working on, but from a performance point of view, ease of use, scalability and reliability, plus we took a performance option for the storage – we were at capacity, so now we are good with the capacity, too – overall, I feel like everybody is happy with the product.

When I am looking at vendors like Oracle, the primary criteria will be the support. When you go through an issue, we need an immediate solution; it’s a 24/7 application. We don't anticipate anything. For example, something like, when we were going through a patching, and suddenly I found an issue. I didn’t see it in my lower environments, and now my production is impacted. We created a severity one ticket. How soon? And can I trust it? That's number one.

There may be some custom solutions we may be looking at, but it's not part of the product. Depending on what type of solution it is, we might need additional support and also training. I think Oracle is growing. I've been using Oracle since 1991, so I know how much it grew outside the database. Training is one of the biggest issues that we are having. We moved from a Windows platform to a Linux platform. Also, how to manage the entire thing; Enterprise Manager completely changed. One is self-learning, another one is vendor-provided, low-cost training. Those are the things we are looking for.

On top of that, you can say there are certain things that can benefit us; there is a new release coming out. If they can provide another training session, like, "Hey, this worried us, and here are the documents." Something like that would really help our DBAs to be at the cutting edge, rather than they themselves having to explore. Those are all things.

We use the solution for financial data purposes which runs at our warehouse.

We have had the benefit from the reduction of almost one terabyte of data from using the querying function.

The feature that allows querying the storage server is great. The solution can handle heavy workloads, always has updated features, fast response times, and many tasks are automated. Furthermore, if you want to do the consultation, instead of maintaining the multiple test systems, or multiple on-premises services, you can use virtualization and you can use it.

A few improvements can be made such as better resource optimization, virtualization where you can see the virtual machine on top of the Exadata, the ability to limit CPUs, and reduced license costs. 

We need a monitoring tool which can in one place, where we can manage, monitor the entire Exadata components. Currently, we have multiple tools for different components to check and verify but one would be a benefit.

I have been using the solution for more than eight years.

If needed you can scale it up. In terms of CPU and memory, we increased the memory and CPUs to accomplish this. You are limited from the hardware you have, increasing the performance of your hardware allows for increased scalability.

There are times when there are complicated problems and we have reached our limits and cannot solve them. This is when we have contacted the support. When this has happened, their team has been good at resolving our problems. Whenever we had these issues we worked with them and they were able to have an answer within a 12 to 24-hour time frame.

The setup was not too complicated. We followed the standards install and we didn't see any big issues. We did try a few different versions and some of the migration can be a little bit labouring but we didn't face any data challenges.

The licensing can be a bit expensive because you need to have certain tools enabled that require them.

Oracle is known to be the number one in their industry; the help and support, the features they are giving the clients comparing to other databases, the new technology, the provide a good solution. They are number one, in my opinion, I strongly recommend the product.

No product is ever perfect, there is always room for improvement and because of this I rate Oracle Exadata an eight out of ten.

One of its most valuable features is the ease of managing infrastructure as a whole; software and hardware coming together in one place to manage all the architecture, networking, hardware, software, storage, etc.

Every year, there is definitely some incremental improvement; faster storage, more compute nodes, better networking, etc. At some point, regarding the whole computation model, instead of just having more and more CPUs, the core itself probably needs to get smarter. Instead of saying, “Oh, it's 16 cores. Now, it's 32. Now, it's 64.”, I would like to see the 16 cores able to do smarter work. That's what I think. I can see it's kind of heading that way, so we might get some improvement in that space.

I have been using it for a little bit over three years.

It's stable. We haven't had any, what I would call Sev 1-type, issues that have caused us a problem with Exadata.

It is a scalable solution. I think it's going to meet the company's needs moving forward, without problems.

Between 1 and 10, technical support is 7 or 8. Time to time, we do run into some issues, here and there, where it takes us a little while to get through, to make sure that engineers understand what's going on. For the most part, we don't have any major hiccups, I guess. Sometimes, the issue is finding the right person, getting to the right person to have that conversation. Once you have that then it's fine, but getting to it takes a little bit of time.

We previously just had commodity servers that we replaced with Exadata for the ease of convenience.

The initial infrastructure setup is straightforward because it is delivered in a box. It's all pre-configured for the most part. Again, I think it boils down to how each company does it after it's deployed at their site. That's where it gets a little bit challenging and that's where you have to put a little bit of effort in to make sure you lay it down right.

I would definitely recommend Exadata to someone in a similar job role as myself at a similar-sized company, but I would also them to understand the need of what they’re trying to do and not necessarily go to Exadata just because it's nice. They need to spend time on what they want to get out of it. Yes, it's a nicely engineered system but they also need to evaluate cost versus benefit. It's not cheap, I can tell you that.

We have two primary use cases for Exadata. The first is for a financial services company, which is an online bank. We use this product for all of their transaction processing. In their locale, they have a lot of transactions related to the automotive industry.

The most valuable feature is the time to solution. 

The standard deviation that comes with it is helpful.

We appreciate the operational standards, which includes patching at least two times per year. This keeps it secure and up to date.

There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements. In my experience, rather than being handled by flash memory, it is being done using the hard drive. This slows it down a lot in certain cases. The reason this happens is that Temp IO often has a lower priority when compared to transactional operations such as Write Vault, Redo Vault, and Commit. This means that it can never get enough "attention" to be placed in flash memory.

The entry-level pricing is too high for the smaller shops.

Some additional built-in automation would be helpful. Some automation already exists in the software deployment process, but different components are handled differently, so more automation would be an improvement.

We have been using Oracle Exadata for about nine years, since 2011.

Stability-wise, I would rate this product close to ten out of ten.

Oracle Exadata is very scalable.

When one of our customers such as a bank employs one or more Exadata machines to handle database work, it means that the whole bank could be using it.

The technical support from Oracle is pretty good. It could be better at times but for the most part, they are knowledgeable.

The initial setup always comes with some complexity because it needs a lot from the customer to prepare the site, network, firewalls, and the rest. The deployment is always complex.

Preparing for deployment can take a couple of months, again depending on the requirements. There are standard things that have to take place, such as allocating space in the data center and making sure that the power, cabling, and switches are there. Once everything is in place, the software installation will take two or three days.

My team handles the deployment for our customers.

The licensing is the same as it is with other Oracle products, which depends on how many CPU cores are activated. In addition to that, there are storage licenses that are needed. All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle.

This is a product that I can recommend, although there needs to be a clear understanding of the use cases because Exadata doesn't come cheap. There is the requisition cost, the cost of support, costs for maintenance, and none of that is cheap. As long as there is a solid reason why Exadata is needed in the organization, I would definitely recommend it.

My suggestion for anybody who is implementing this solution is geared towards the in-house DBAs as opposed to customers in general. DBAs tend to handle Exadata the way they would any Oracle database, which is not the way to do it. Many of them have been working with Oracle databases for their entire career, and often, training on Exadata is necessary to get it working properly.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Speed and stability.

Payroll used to take two and a half days. It now takes one or two hours.

The Oracle support team needs to understand the product better than the customers do.

We have been using this solution for one and a half years.

We had no deployment issues.

We had minor stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

Customer service was OK.

Technical support was OK.

We switched due to our corporate growth and our performance needs.

The setup was straightforward.

We did the implementation in-house.

We evaluated EMC and SSD storage arrays.