Oracle Exadata Reviews

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.

There are so many it’s hard to just name a few but -

• Cell off-loading
• Reliability
• ExaCheck
• InfiniBand

Many diverse applications were migrated to the Exadata platform that had either performance or stability issues. All have had very reliable and performance since.

Their hardware engineers can’t be beat. They are the best people I have ever worked with and parts are installed very quickly and efficiently. They’re very easy to work with, schedule jobs with, and get things done. Also, they are very proactive as well.

Most of my suggestions for Exadata itself have been addressed in X5. Oracle keeps improving the reliability and adding more hot swappable parts for the hardware and software.

The only improvements left are not with the product itself but with MOS support, ASR and patching. For MOS software support, there are some very talented people there, but not enough of them. They need more software engineers with in depth training on how to use the ASR system and the jump gate.

When the jump gate is updated or patched, it seems to take a bit to get things working properly again so patching and ASRs can be done. Platinum patching continues to improve but it is not a hands off solution.There is quite a bit of manual effort involved with each patch cycle to co-ordinate the patching. With some of the patching there, is downtime, and most of it is rolling but there are a few cases where you do need have downtime.

Since v1, almost six years.

Just the normal software bugs, nothing major. In fact considering the complexity, there are very few bugs at hardware/software level. The ASR system with the jump gate was more problematic than the Exadata setup.

No, very stable and reliable. On one quarter-rack we have 27 databases running, which astounds me every time I patch and do maintenance.

We have added more memory and additional storage arrays, and adding more memory is very easy, while adding a storage array takes some time, but it is not as complicated as I expected. We will be expanding our local file system soon not sure how complex this will be. Adding ZFS is fairly straightforward and has become easier since I first did it three years ago.

My hardware support is beyond compare. The MOS software support is good but there are just too few experienced people.

AIX, and we switched partly due to a hardware refresh, and partly due to performance, and the growth of some of the applications.

Documents are very clear, and there were many software and hardware engineers available to provide assistance and guidance along the way. The most difficult piece was the ASR system set up with the jump gate, password vault and set up in OEM. The other difficulty was the network, and some of that was due to my lack of experience in that area.

We had one application that went down constantly and since we moved to the Exadata there have been few issues outages and incidents.Huge performance gains as well.

Really evaluate your needs from a hardware and software end. Buy what you will need for between three and five years down the line, in terms of storage and memory. Buy products either before Oracle’s fiscal year end (May) or Open World. You can bundle all of your Oracle products into one agreement to get the best discounts. Try to get training and some consulting time into the agreement.Some companies leverage the partner or beta programs. I did one such beta test and was glad I did because I made improvements.

We had tried other storage and hardware options but nothing really got us performance we needed for some of our applications. We migrated applications from AIX to Linux VM and Exadata. The most critical or resource intensive applications go to Exadata.

There is a learning curve to this product and it is complex at the hardware, network and software levels. Train all your staff, not just the database administrations as the network and UNIX admns have to get familiar with the components. Exadata classes are available and the DBAs should know RAC and services well.

The starter databases are a template for new databases. Run ExaChks weekly, and set up OEM to monitor Exadata, but spend time to make sure you do it correctly. If you have a large Exadata foot print look at ZFS for backups and evaluate if you have the staff to support it. If not make sure you partner with the correct consultants.

Oracle does provide Platinum patching services but that has to be managed. Read about the product and really evaluate how to use it properly. Talk to other customers and join Exadata groups. Do a proof of concept, so see if there is a sandbox to try out. And probably the best hint is that MOS has an Exadata best practice guide - follow it as best you can. Granted there are some things you have to do for vendor products. But the more you can get out of these the better off you will be for patching, MOS etc.

The solution is used for Extreme Bare metal and virtual compute performance for the business to scale up as per the heterogeneous database loads.

Exadata has greatly benefited our business cycle as operational efficiency has improved by 200%.

Also, our business analytics platform performance has improved by 300%

Exadata uses a scale-out design with unique optimizations that include persistent memory, SQL query offload, and built-in resource management to optimize performance for OLTP, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads running in consolidated environments.

• Exadata Smart Flash Cache - caches database objects with flash memory operations.
• Integrated appliance with all components supported by one vendor, Oracle.

• It needs built-in big data features.
• I'd like to see smart auto-healing features with machine-learning libraries.
• Less power consumption would be nice.
• It needs integrated cloud software to enable cloud connectivity.

Exadata X9M uses a combination of scale-out storage, RDMA over Converged Ethernet networking, database offload, persistent memory accelerator, and PCIe Flash to deliver extremely high performance from memory and flash.

We have been using the solution for ten years.

There were no stability issues.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

Oracle customer service is the best in the industry.

Technical Support:

Technical support for Exadata is the best in the industry.

Positive

Traditional Oracle RAC to Oracle Exadata RAC due to having scalable and robust database consolidated platform for upcoming release 12.2, which can consolidate multi-character sets within a single container and heterogeneous data guard support.

It was a bit complex to fit in with our business requirements initially, but post-implementation it was great. It will work as the most stable and scalable database ever run on Linux with various complex workloads.

We implemented it in-house and advisors for major global Exadata deployments helped.

We have seen a 300% ROI.

Oracle needs to reduce the licensing cost to get more market penetration and offer an Open Financing Option.

We evaluated SAP HANA and other relevant platform for analytics.

I would truly recommend this to all SMEs and Big Enterprises for consolidating databases with a unified next-generation platform.

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.

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.

All business Oracle databases were spread across many DB servers and different platforms. We consolidated all of our databases onto a single Exadata box to ensure that they were running on the same platform and have greater coordination and integration between the databases. Also, we gained performance without much change in the database code, as well as saved a greater amount of space by applying the compression feature. 

We experienced a significant performance improvement without changing the code, simply utilizing Oracle Exadata standard smart features including Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, and Storage Indexes.

We saved a great amount of storage by applying different levels of HCC and removing ninety percent of the indexes. This is a powerful and extremely stable system with IB network speed.

Most of the Exadata features are enabled by default, without the need for configuration. For example, the smart features include Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Storage Indexes, and IB 40GB. 

Compression is a great feature, where one can really save a lot of storage.

Oracle has introduced Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and autonomous features for automatic database tuning. The new addition of X8M has come with a direct memory read future to deliver amazing performance for all sorts of OLTP and analytics workloads. This should benefit the Exa community.

General perception from many customers is the cost and maintenance of exadata database machine. Although Oracle recently introduced low cost storage and automated many features, still the cost and maintenance is a concern. Oracle should provide free of cost the Exadata software on the box to have more customers.

We have been using this solution for more than eight years.

Every component in the Oracle Exadata database is redundant. Hence, it provides HA for every layer.

This solution offers the flexibility to add more servers, storage servers, or a combination of both.

Oracle support service needs more improvement.

We haven't used Engineered Systems for Oracle database platforms, though, we were on various platforms that were difficult to manage and maintain.

The bare metal setup is done by Oracle professionals and managed by them. Though, customers can manage this on their own, depending on the skill set of their team.

Our implementation was done on-site, through the vendor.

We realize ROI through higher throughput, high availability, and business continuity.

Exadata is an expensive tool, but, considering the ROI, it's worth going for the solution.

We compared other market players of Engineered systems. However, Oracle Exadata features are unmatched by other players in the market.

Oracle is coming out with many advanced hardware additions and software solutions to make this product the world's best database machine.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is durable. It is a highly relevant option with extreme performance. The extreme performance is one of the key features when you're using Exadata. There are known points that you need to take care of, simply "beware of update".!

I'm currently writing a data warehouse on Exadata. Before this solution, we were aiming for this to be completed by 8 a.m., when our ETLs would finish. With the help of Exadata's special features, this was reduced to 3 a.m.

This solution allows us to bring more data within the same time period. It provides us with more subject areas that provide more reports to our users. Our ETL times reduced to 65%, then to 50%.

I would like to see more database features and maybe more archiving features, because we need to do data archiving. I would like to see additional database memory.

My first implementation was in 2009 and still using.

No.

There's nothing bad to say about Exadata. It's stable, durable, and always up and running. My DBAs do online patches and online backup.

This product is scalable. We first started with the quarter rack, and then we expanded to the full rack.

Previous to this solution, we were using a normal Oracle RAC service. We were just waiting for this product to come out.

The installation is easy because it comes out-of-the-box and you just start using it.

We had already chosen Exadata, so we didn't compare this solution with many other products.

Get the database on Oracle first. If you are in an Oracle stack, it would be much better to use the Oracle products. If you are driving a Ferrari, you wouldn’t put a Mercedes engine in it. If you are writing a query, you cannot rely on other brands.

I'm an architect, so when I look for a product, I look for performance.

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.