Oracle Exadata Reviews

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.

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 system is engineered to run both databases and enterprise applications unlike other engineered systems, which are either tailored only for databases or only for applications. The ability to consolidate all of the databases is a big plus.

The SuperCluster provides best of both worlds – Oracle Exadata functionality along with virtualization at the firmware and the OS kernel layers.

On the Exadata side the features most valuable are – Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) for both Data Warehouse and OLTP workloads, Storage Indexes for Smart Scan, ability to use Flash Cache for DB storage, and more.

With SuperCluster and Exadata, all of the servers and storage are integrated within the same rack. This reduces the configuration and setup time, increases performance, and makes maintenance and patching easy. We are able to consolidate all of the databases and application stack on a single SuperCluster with Exadata.

In the area of Solaris zone-level virtualization, it would be good to have memory capping as a tool for memory management. Currently for 11g databases running on Exadata with smart scan against hybrid columnar compressed (HCC), tables could result in errors. It would be nice to have a patch rather than the current solution of upgrading the databases to 12c.

Currently, we have a Half-Rack SuperCluster with 2 SPARC T5-8 Compute Nodes and 4 Exadata Storage Servers. Current version of Exadata is 12.1.2.1.3. The compute nodes are running Solaris 11.2 with Oracle11g 11.2.0.4 databases. We've been using it for close to three years.

We had few issues while deploying DB zones. This virtualization has to be carried out differently when compared to DB LDOM virtualization.

There have been no major problems so far with stability.

There have been no major problems so far with scalability.

Overall it has been good so far.

Overall it has been good so far. In the case of engineered systems like SuperCluster/Exadata, the patching has to go through the support team and there is definitely room for improvements in this area.

Previously, we had multiple servers both with and without physical partitioning. The storage for all of the servers had to be zoned to a SAN. The servers and the storage previously were from different vendors and we had to integrate those. Other product offerings were evaluated, but with all of those we had to explicitly integrate the compute, storage, and networking components. In addition, we could not get the benefits of database optimizations with Exadata and have to pay the penalty for virtualization overhead and network traffic between compute and storage layers.

There is a certain degree of complexity with respect to the initial design of the Exadata storage cell disks and grid disks to meet the customer’s application needs. This especially true when migrating from an existing setup. Care has to be taken with regard to the initial domain configurations since this will determine the LDOM and zone-level virtualization. The Exadata disks have to be exposed to both the DB LDOMS and DB Zones.

The initial setup was from the vendor team (for any engineered systems from Oracle). But later we had to continue the setup to cater to our application and business needs. Prior to the implementation, all of the IP allocations are to be completed for the three layers – Client/Public network, InfiniBand private network, and the Management network.

At this time, I do not have the actual numbers but would rate the ROI is pretty good.

In the long run one can consolidate the various DB related licenses. The number of cores required to run the DBs and applications is much lower on a SuperCluster with Exadata, thereby leading to fewer licenses and reduced cost. Since the entire stack is owned by one vendor (in this case Oracle) the core factor for licensing is 0.5 leading to fewer licenses for the software components.

The SuperCluster in addition to Exadata storage also comes with ZFS storage cluster. Since the compute nodes, storage and networking components are fully integrated with InfiniBand I/O fabric this provides very high performance between various components. Also, it has built-in hardware encryption to provide data security.

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).

When you talk about Exadata, the phrase that comes to mind is "database consolidation." We are consolidating 28 different databases from the revenue authority in Exadata. Fortunately, close to 70 percent of those databases are on Oracle, but they were all on Oracle 11g. We migrated them to 12c, and now we are pumping them into 19c to transfer them to the new Exadata X9M.

Exadata is a fantastic machine. Two features stand out. The first is the resource input/output management tool that allows you to manage the resources to the neck on the Exadata box. 

The second feature I like is ROC. I come from a data center background, so I've been doing storage and fabric interconnection to all that stuff. With ROC, where the fabric interconnection or the Brocade goes out of use, the data goes directly from storage to computation. It's great. 

I liked Spark, but it was discontinued when Exadata L6 came back. I loved it, and I wish they would bring back Spark integration.  

I started working on Exadata in 2018. I was the first person in East Africa to be certified in Exadata in 2013, and I'm proud of that. In the past five months, I've been deploying Exadata for a government revenue authority as a consultant.

Exadata's database consolidation can save a lot of money. For example, one current customer was spending close to $800,000 on database licensing, but they are looking at $250,000 after consolidation.

If I walk into the office of any customer and I want to sell my Exadata, I tell the finance officer, "Boss, I plan to bring down your license costs by half." That's what I'll tell them. "If you want to see the magic, that's what I plan to do for you."

I rate Oracle Exadata 10 out of 10.

I primarily use Exadata to handle the databases of critical applications.

Exadata's best features are its performance during redo logging and the elasticity of the database handling.

Exadata would be improved with single dashboard visibility.

I've been working with Exadata for six to seven years.

Exadata is stable.

Exadata is scalable.

The initial installation took around a week.

I would recommend Exadata to other users for its database management and would rate it eight out of ten.

My primary job on Exadata is working with the Oracle engineer whenever a customer makes a patching request. We engage with the Oracle engineer regarding Exadata patching in a quarterly manner, around every three months. I collaborate and communicate with our customers daily regarding these activities on Exadata.

On our customer side, we deploy Exadata X7 and Exadata X5. We work on our customer's side with Exadata patching on Exa 5 and Exa 7, and with an Oracle Enterprise Manager regarding monitoring purposes.

Their monitoring tool is available in the Exadata environment where you can easily monitor all things in the Exa tech support and if there is any issue present in Exa, you can easily fix it.

We are willing to migrate our customers to Exadata X8 since this is a new version of Oracle Exadata.

Their Smart Scan is a very capable feature with a great data retrieval rate.

It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions.

I have been using Oracle Exadata for one and a half years.

Exadata is also a very stable environment. Their Smart Scan feature is great for every banking environment and financial institutions willing to implement it. 

It is a very scalable environment.

Our customers are very satisfied regarding Exadata because when we raise a call with Oracle regarding any issue their response is very prompt, within 5 minutes. And an engineer is available for working on the issue.

The initial setup was very easy and took two to four hours working on it because this is an engineer system. So the Oracle engineer and the ACS team worked on it and on the on-premises database to migrate to Oracle Exadata.

In our current situation it is not bad, it's a very capable and very comprehensive solution.

On a scale of one to ten I rate Exadata a ten!