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Oracle Exadata Valuable Features

Guruprasad Gonjare - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Cloud Architecture at LTIMINDTREE

We like the tool’s features like Smart Scan, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and the TFA.

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RP
SubDirector of Project Management at DISH

We're working on making our usage to be part of a service in a manner that the client can use the information and create their own dashboards, and reports. The client can access the information they need based on the role they have. It prevents them from being dependant on an IT department for access.

The data replication is very good.

The solution offers a good data warehouse.

The solution allows us to avoid conflict with the transactional databases. 

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Arun Kumarasamy - PeerSpot reviewer
Exadata ,Senior Oracle DBA and Goldengate Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

It's an entire hardware box where the software and the hardware combination can fasten our queries for the database. The tool has an intelligent cell server where the data is processed at the storage layer rather than the server layer.

The tool supports our big data analytics and data warehousing needs. It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing. Oracle has the best database technology in the world. Exadata is the best hardware machine designed for huge database workloads along with OLTP.

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Buyer's Guide
Oracle Exadata
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Oracle Exadata. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Jörg Bieri - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at OrcaNet GmbH

The most valuable feature is storage offloading. If properly used, it will increase performance dramatically.

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Ahmed-Yehia - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech lead at Linux Plus Information Systems

High availability and high performance are very valuable aspects of the solution. The key capability of Exadata, which is not found in any other solution or appliance, is its enhancement specifically for databases.

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Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology

We have multiple transactions performed in multiple areas of banking. In India, we have UPI transactions, wallets, and virtual money, so there are several types of transactions going on. We can use a third party or a separate data warehouse such as Greenplum for the enterprise team. Oracle is easy to use for peripheral things, such as the data vault and the data firewall, data sync, and partitions. These are the features that give an edge to other databases. And when we sync between these databases from Exadata, it provides you with many features, such as compression ratios.

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Robin Saikat Chatterjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Solutioning Technology and Architeture at Tata Consultancy Services

Ksplice, Prevalidated Oracle RPMS, the testing done with Oracle database and WebLogic, and the UEK kernel have made Oracle Linux systems best for running large Oracle databases and other packaged applications. Exadata's IORM and DBRM make it a great consolidation platform. Its smart scan feature and flash cache are unparalleled in providing performance.

The new Exadata x9m has an even higher speed of 100GBps connectivity.

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FG
IT Architect at TIM

What I like best about Oracle Exadata is its good performance. It's also a very fast solution.

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Rodion Bykadorov - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at SA Capital

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.

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CB
Senior Technical Director at AEM Corporation

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.

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reviewer1395711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy CEO, CIO at a insurance company with 51-200 employees

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.

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AS
Enterprise Architect at TechnipEnergies

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

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it_user452334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Principal Consultant at Pythian

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.

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SA
Senior Database Consultant at Riyad Bank

Oracle Exadata has very good hardware and provides fast, and high performance.

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it_user521646 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director - OSP/Engineered Systems at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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

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it_user436020 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Oracle Database Administrator at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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NH
Oracle Techno Sales consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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. 

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Semih Erakay - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of e-Transformation Services at VBT Bilgi Teknolojileri A.Ş.

Parallelism is the most valuable feature.

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DP
Data Center Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

According to the engineering team, and I agree, the most valuable features are the voucher, certification, and quick support. 

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reviewer602496 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Workload offloading to the cell layer : Exadata is Oracle's engineered system which SW and HW are compatible and contains many layers (compute nodes – networking – storage or cells), so compute nodes receives request or transactions then offload their processing to the cell through InfiniBand switches and this storage or cells contains high speed flash memory and Exadata driver software that has many features that provide high performance.

High availability of each component and everything is redundant: as I mentioned before Exadata conations many layers each one of them is redundant for example at least there are two clustered compute nodes contains databases homes, instances, binaries...etc. these clustered nodes are active/active, so if one of the go down the work will continue so this is High availability and redundancy for compute nodes layer, this similar to InfiniBand Switches and storage failure groups.

Smart scan feature and the flash memory: it is part of Exadata driver software which is preinstalled on cells storage which provides the compute node with the required selected data or rows only not the whole tables as normal ASM, so filtering is done at the level cell by using the flash memory.

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it_user521928 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

It's about consolidation of my infrastructure, scalability, high performance, and availability. These are the main factors that led me to choose this solution, as well as the cost. Exadata saves on my storage costs. All our costs were reduced significantly, and that was the reason why we went back to Exadata.

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it_user396558 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Lead - Infrastructure Design Database at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Most, if not all of the time, a database workload is a disk I/O-bound, not CPU nor memory. The most time spent in a database operation is reading a data block from or writing a data block to physical disks. This is true for any type of workloads -- small or large block read and write, sequential or random access. The Exadata technology minimizes this bottleneck by utilizing

  1. Oracle's proprietary intelligent storage software which understands Oracle database I/O characteristics and thus is able to minimize number of disk I/O, and
  2. High-speed Infiniband network for storage network (40 Gb/sec throughput, 5 times higher than the typical fibre channel used for SAN).
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it_user238071 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Global Database Architect at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the integration of the various components that make the performance soar. More specifically the presence of storage indexes along with the Exadata Storage Server software, which delivers process offloading, allows us to deliver better performance without indexes--saving space and CPU. This innovative feature is not something we would be able to replicate with other solutions. In addition, we consider the features smart scan, smart flashcache, smart flash log and hybrid columnar compression very useful.

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BJ
IT Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Complete management occurs from one single address instead of different servers. 

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TI
Department Unified Communication Head at Mana

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

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Vedat Gunes - PeerSpot reviewer
BI & Analytics Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is its capabilities for storing and processing data. It is very good for our domain. 

The solution only requires one person for maintenance and support in an average-sized insurance company.

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Adriano-Simao - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at Triana Business Solutions Lda

Business Continuity is the most valuable feature. The replication between the site via Data Guard is performing without any constraints, the agility to make tests of switchover, and back following disaster recovery procedure. The performance using this machine to providing database service is as easy as next to next database administrations. We can run AWR data collection for performance evaluation and problem-solving without any production performance constraints. Using Database partitioning and Cache Memory in each storage cell boost all we need as a database machine. The easy administration gives us time for training, improve our business understanding, and care about our competitors. Also, the container Database (CDB/PDB) together with other technologies (like Micro Services) can very improve the company core business.

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it_user515301 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
  • Oracle OEM
  • Analytic functions and Window functions
  • Parallelism
  • Hints to the optimizer
  • Gather statistics
  • Extended Statistics
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it_user517617 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Performance with use of storage compute.

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it_user247236 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and President at Viscosity North America

My top 4 most important features of Exadata are:

1. Smart Scan, the ability to offload intensive SQL workloads to the storage servers. Queries are offloaded to the storage layer and only the result sets of relevant data are returned to the database server thus significantly improving performance.

2. Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, where we can compress data from 10x to 50x. Deploying databases on the Exadata can significantly reduce the amount of storage that is needed.

3. Exadata Smart Flash Cache automatically moves data between DRAM, flash and spinning SAS or SATA disks to provide best performance.

4. Virtualization is a new feature introduced to the X5-2 family. Now Oracle’s Database Machine can be catered to large enterprise mission critical databases and can house smaller databases that need isolation and now even application servers together with the database. We can connect data intensive applications to the database over low-latency, high throughput infiniband.

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TS
Partner at Tsp Teknoloji Danışmanlık A.Ş.

The tool performs well with a large database. It is easy to integrate the tool with other ELT solutions. The performance and data transformation are excellent. We recommend it to our clients. The tool has good storage technologies.

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MF
Tech Lead at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

What I like most about Oracle Exadata is its smart scan feature.

I also like that it supports higher capacities and it's high-performing, so my company can use Oracle Exadata for massive databases.

Oracle Exadata is one of the best products of Oracle, with the best engineering.

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Juliet Hoimonthi - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Robi Axiata Limited

We have used this solution for a long period of time so it has become easy for us to query any kind of data from Oracle Exadata which has been valuable. 

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AM
GIO IT Infra Build Er. DBA at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The reports are always readily available. The backup solution that is the data file system is available for a 30 day insert. There is really no other software solution that gives us the same quality backup and restoration like this.

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EA
Sr. Director, Systems & Databases at Gtech
  • Backup/Restore performance: Fast backups, fast restores (especially useful for creating clone environments)
  • Low Memory utilization on database nodes: The database performs less work, especially for I/O. This is due to the ability to offload processing from the database nodes (compute nodes) to the storage nodes (cells).
  • Decrease in I/O (from the perspective of database nodes): thanks to smart scan, the amount of data transferred from storage to database nodes significantly decreases.
  • High I/O performance: Due to Smart Scan, storage indexes and intelligent storage server nodes and storage server software(cells).
  • Decrease in database size and decrease in I/O: Due to Exadata specific compression techniques, database size decreases. In addition, the amount of I/O that is done for querying the same amount of data is decreased, as well. (This one also increases performance of the queries.)
  • Increase in redo write speed: Smart flash logs provide better LGWR performance, as LGWR writes redo data both flash and disk in parallel. It considers whichever of these writes completes first as done.
  • Smart Flash Logs are a new feature that comes with 11.2.2.2.4 cell software. They are not for reading. They are used like a circular buffer for redo writes. Smart Flash Logs can enhance the performance of an OLTP database.
  • Ability to prioritize I/O using IORM: IORM is used for managing the Storage I/O resources. We can manage our I/O resources based on the Categories, Databases and Consumer Groups. The hierarchy that we build, used to distribute I/O.
  • IORM must be used on Exadata if you have a lot of databases running on an Exadata Machine. IORM is a friend of consolidation projects, in my opinion.
  • Automatic SR creation using ASR: Decreases management costs. Oracle Auto Service Request (ASR) is a secure, scalable, customer-installable software feature of warranty and Oracle Support Services that provides auto-case generation when common hardware component faults occur. ASR manager can be installed on an external Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris server. Also, you can use one of the Exadata database nodes for installing ASR manager (not preferred).
  • Implementing QOS for CPU using Instance caging: Instance caging can be used to limit the CPU usage in the database level. It is a good thing for building consolidation environment. It can be configured for preventing the non production residing on the same Exadata database machine to allocate the resources excessively, leaving no space in CPU queues for the production environments.
  • Fast support by Oracle: Maybe it is because it is an engineered system or maybe it is because of another reason, the quality and speed of Oracle support is very satisfactory.
  • Single vendor support: Software and hardware support by Oracle.
  • High Availability: It is a Highly available database machine. It provides built-in high availability, at both software (for example: Oracle RAC) and hardware levels.
  • Scalability: Exadata is a scale-out compute and storage platform.
  • Ability to create tablespaces and datafiles very quickly.
  • Offers a database environment built by Oracle: An Oracle database machine, that is built, optimized, certified and supported by the RDBMS vendor (Oracle). (Oracle RDBMS is the concern of this machine. Exadata is built for it.)
  • InfiniBand network for RAC private interconnect: InfiniBand functionality. CPU cycles of the servers are not used for InfiniBand transport.
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it_user403353 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DBA and Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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it_user259974 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle DBA with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

  • Cell off-loading
  • Reliability
  • ExaCheck
  • InfiniBand
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IB
Head of Data Value at Innova-tsn

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.

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it_user521637 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence and Data Integration Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

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.

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SH
Specialist, Database & Hadoop Administration at Robi Axiata Limited

The tool's performance is good. 

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it_user521661 - PeerSpot reviewer
DBA at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

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.

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reviewer1467993 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Administrator at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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it_user521913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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SU
Master Consultant - RedHat & Oracle Cloud, Virtualization , Automation at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user515445 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager

Speed and stability.

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GO
Data Quality Software Development Manager at Yapı Kredi Bank

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".!

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it_user419178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Enterprise Database Admin at Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA)

The High Availability and rolling upgrade features are the most important for us. They help us achieve zero downtime and increased performance.

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reviewer1395711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy CEO, CIO at a insurance company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable part of the product is performance enhancement.  

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SH
CTO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

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Javid Ur Rahaman - PeerSpot reviewer
VP, Infrastructure,Data Management Services & AI Evangelist at a tech company with 51-200 employees
  • Exadata Smart Flash Cache - caches database objects with flash memory operations.
  • Integrated appliance with all components supported by one vendor, Oracle.
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Adriano-Simao - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at Triana Business Solutions Lda

Oracle Exadata's performance is one of its best features. We very satisfied with it. The previous equipment used to make a payment for all the government employees used to take at least two days for some of the transactions. Now, it will take hours to make the same amount of payments. Another thing is the flexibility to organize all of our databases. We can use it with new features that come with this version of Oracle 19c, which is the container database. With container databases, we can work with many databases, organized and segregated, and still access the functions and management, the things that most of the technical people like to have in place.

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it_user521562 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Administrator

It enables us to consolidate, that's one thing. We have consolidated five databases into one box, so that definitely a cost-savings there. We migrated from ODS to X5-2, so that is one thing.

The second thing of course are the extra features like the storage indexes. In short, the main feature that we take advantage of is the intelligence within the  storage which makes it no longer a "dumb storage" server. That is another main thing.

We did some PoC tests with our own data, and we were really getting 10x using Hybrid Columnar Compression, unique to Exadata, so some cost savings there.

Those are the things. Performance has gotten better, less footprint, and consolidation.

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it_user515163 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Programmer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Smart scan and smart indices are the most valuable features.

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it_user522234 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DBA at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its most valuable feature is the smart scan functionality. It allows for the queries to work faster. It offloads the stuff to the cell server, so it provides better performance.

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TK
cloud security and DevSecOps Apecialist at Join Cloud Ltd.

It offers a significant advantage for accommodating a large number of users. To put it in perspective, a standard Oracle database may only support around four hundred to five hundred simultaneous users. However, when utilizing Exadata, this capacity can be dramatically increased to accommodate two thousand or even three thousand simultaneous end users, demonstrating its scalability and performance capabilities.

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RB
IT Consultant at Trend Import-Export

The separation between the database nodes and storage cells is the key feature of Exadata. The capabilities of the storage cells, the intelligence, are excellent. 

The speed is unbeatable. 

Exadata was mostly for data warehouses. However, in time with a model of powerful processors in database nodes, it's also an OLTP machine. It's very good. The latest versions offer even more performance, as they have a persistent memory and a lot of features.

The usage of the internal InfiniBand Switches is a key feature in Exadata. Everything is fast due to this separation at the database level and storage level. It's intelligently designed and has a very fast connection between all of the components of Exadata. 

We can use virtualization on Exadata. We can choose capacity on demand. There are a lot of new features that have turned up in the past two to four years. The solution is growing and becoming broader in its scope.

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it_user521760 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Performance.

Excavation is purely for the storage of the data warehouses. It does what it needs to do. It performs. We have an active-passive DR. We tested it, it works. We can switch datacenters within reasonable time and go completely live in another data center on the technology we have.

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JS
Database Infrastructure Cloud Architect-Oracle,AWS Migration,Upgardes(Cassandra,Postgres,Hadoop BI) at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Exadata storage cell offloading software is the most valuable feature.

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it_user419811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Administrator & technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The performance of Smart Scan, Storage Indexes, etc., and the High Availability features are all valuable to us.

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it_user275232 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

The extreme performance and data compression that comes straight out of the box.

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reviewer1620885 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President & Head of IT Governance at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is extremely stable. That's one of the main reasons we are using it.

The product is flexible.

It's a fairly easy-to-use solution.

The solution scales quite well and always meets our needs when we need to extend it.

The product is very easy to install.

Technical support is quite good.

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Adriano-Simao - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at Triana Business Solutions Lda

Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement.

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it_user240024 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Stability, high ROI and low TCO. Plus performance, of course. Being able to compress the data, especially in big size databases, has been extremely useful as HCC can deliver quite high compression rates. The business benefits of OES are as many as the pure technical benefits/features.

Exadata with the In-Memory option is several levels about SAP HANA.

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it_user521697 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Engineer at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees

Usually, the I/O operation is a more intensive and costly one. In any transaction processing, the I/O is a more expensive operation due to storage and better performance. That's where most of the latency and time would be spent in overall flow. Exadata has an additional service and computing power at the storage level as well which reduces this latency. Usually it's available only on the high-end machines.

Exadata as a platform is a complete solution, where you have CPU memory with an additional server and inter-cell storage. That's the beauty of Exadata; IOPS and good overall latency and that's why we like it. We use it for the transaction processing, especially for production.

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it_user521958 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Data Warehouse Development | Business Intelligence at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are the high columnar compression and the flash cache. Basically, the whole I/O subsystem is valuable, but those two features are really big for us.

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it_user521757 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO Group Services at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is fast and integrated. It combines hardware with the software that we use from Oracle. It's a complete stack, not only for the hardware but the full implementation and delivery, so it’s really good for IT.

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it_user457482 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Leader at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

Oracle Engineered Systems are the best solution for Oracle and non-Oracle applications: hardware and software are combined together to ensure high availability and maximum performance. Oracle Exadata contains all the advantages of standard Oracle Database, but on top of that there are exclusive features such as IORM (IO Resource Manager) and HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression). IORM (in combination with Database Resource Manager (DBRM)) permits you to isolate I/O requests to avoid I/O saturation. HCC provides different levels of compression to reduce space allocation and to decrease I/O.

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it_user452355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Principal Consultant at Viscosity

Some of the features which are specific to Exadata, like histories, offloading and accurate processing. One of the customers we work with had mostly thousands of batch jobs, which used to take, 30 to 40 hours, with the Exadata, and re-architecturing some of those solutions on the Exadata, moving them. It turned out to be running in one hour, or less than one hour. It's a huge, huge performance gain. And in the end, the company realized the return on the investment they have made into Exadata.

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it_user259971 - PeerSpot reviewer
ITA - Oracle Apps DBA at Tata Consultancy Services
  • Smart Scan
  • Smart Flash Cache
  • High Availability
  • Consolidation
  • Robust Storage
  • Computing
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SP
Technical Director at Wissen infotech

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the storage available.

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MR
Solution Sales Specialist at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The performance on the databases is good.

You get less timing and latency with this product. When you compare the solution to some other devices as compared to this Exadata, the latency units are very high on them. When you talk about the performance of this specific solution, it's excellent.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is helpful.

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PX
Sales Manager at LTA-RH Informatica

Regarding features, there are so many that we can offer to customers. When we sell Exadata Cloud, there are many options to choose from, especially when it comes to enterprise database options. In my experience, the main features that are appreciated are various ones like GPS and the assortment of security options.

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MF
Tech Lead at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

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.

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it_user296958 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

The fact that we can consolidate all our databases into a single box is a cool feature. The extreme performance of Exadata is something that was worth paying for. Exadata performs at least 5-10 times faster than databases on conventional storage.

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it_user521763 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Oracle DBA at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Offloading is the most valuable feature of Exadata.

It integrates well with our other products.

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it_user521592 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The best features are its robustness, stability, and performance.

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it_user522177 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is supposed to be speed. I like the consolidation with the memory, the SSD and the InfiniBand, and the algorithms that they use internally to take different paths through for the database traffic. All of those features are why we went with it.

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it_user247422 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO/Architect at Viscosity North America

The most valuable feature is definitely the performance. However, it's also a platform for both performance and consolidation. Once you start leveraging Exadata with Database In-Memory and Multitenant, you've got a really solid platform for database enterprise computing.

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it_user395682 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Oracle DBA - RAC and Exadata at a tech services company

There are several features I've found valuable, including Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression, Exadata Smart Scan Technology, and Smart Flash Cache.

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it_user521898 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Oracle DBA at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Exadata storage is very fast and it gives really good performance. Sometimes people buy a good server with a lot of CPU, pay a lot of money, but they have very poor storage performance and then they don't get enough performance from their system.

Exadata really gives good storage performance and our business applications run very fast.

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it_user521679 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director Technical Services at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The fact that it's an engineered system. It's a database in a box, storage, the networking, the compute engines. All of it's in one nice neat package. My DBAs like administering it. My application owners like its reliability on the back end.

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it_user517464 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Performance and storage is good.

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it_user521679 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director Technical Services at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the fact that it's an engineered system. It's a database in a box, storage, the networking, the compute engines. All of it's in one nice, neat package. My DBAs like administering it. My application owners like its reliability on the back end.

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KK
Exadata Certified and Oracle Certified DBA Consultant at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

This is an engineered system by Oracle. It provides very fast communication between the storage and database. A lot of data processing is done at the storage level.

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it_user517551 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist with 10,001+ employees

The solution offloads the storage. This gives us great performance without impacting the CPU.

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it_user522231 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Exadata has been very great for us in terms of database consolidation. We have been using Exadata because we have been upgrading our technology every single year. In the past, we were using a Sun server and managing that as an active-passive cluster.

There have been initiatives to convert the databases to Oracle RAC; so when Exadata came out, they didn't really have to do much of anything. The grid infrastructure and everything came built in with all the best practices.

One of the advantages we found was that we didn't really need to be the first ones to be hit by a bug. If any of our customers comes across a bug, we already had a patch ready for it.

We have the platinum service for the database. That comes in handy in terms of high availability.

With all of this, the storage and the compute nodes were built together so they have more knowledge of Oracle-related queries: whether it is a redo or an IO; or it's coming from an undo space or from a DML. All these kinds of things come in really handy for us in terms of making our database perform really well.

These are some of the advantages I think we got out of Exadata.

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it_user521985 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Fast performance and tons of storage that we can have to put a lot of databases under the Exadata Server are the most valuable features in this product.

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it_user436146 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The place where I've used it are mainly on the data warehouses with larger implementations, and having everything in one enclosure is really a lot nicer. Having the disk, all the memory, and all the networking, makes not just the implementation easier, but as you're running it, a lot simpler to administer. Because we're asking it to handle everything, it's a simple solution to administer and support. It also has plugins that makes it easier to monitor.

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VS
Systems Engineer at Informatics (Private) Limited

The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the integration with other solutions, such as SAN storage and shared VLAN network.

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it_user522228 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle DBA at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They just have a lot of products, and they work well together.

I think it's free. That's one more thing.

I think it's better than the VMware from that perspective. I think it has improved quite a bit in the last 12 months. They're still lagging behind, but I like the new features they're introducing. I think that's why I'm one of the applicants for the product.

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RS
Infrastructure Architect at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Storage Base Indexes, Caging and Hybrid Column Compression.

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it_user521595 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Oracle Database Architect at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

The most valuable feature is the flash cache. Let's say you have brought it in at the application level. You don't want to change your code. You take the object, you put it in the flash, and it runs fast.

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it_user448662 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, IT at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The performance.

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it_user259683 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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it_user242436 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Principal Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user521775 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dev Lead PeopleSoft FIN at a religious institution with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user522213 - PeerSpot reviewer
DBA at a religious institution with 51-200 employees

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.

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it_user521874 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Performance Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user448296 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Development Leader at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

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
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it_user521901 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Section Of DB Ms Support And Deployment at Sportmaster

Scalability and high performance, real high performance.

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it_user515226 - PeerSpot reviewer
DBA Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Stability and performance.

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it_user521970 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix/Linux Platform Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

It provides performance for our highly critical applications.

They seem to be doing real well with keeping up on the performance and everything, especially what I have seen with the new chipset that is being offered. I can't really think of anything that they are not doing that they should be doing.

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it_user521541 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Technology at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The scale of the product is the most valuable feature. We use it for data warehouse and for that, we need to process a whole bunch of data faster. That is one of the features that we use this product most.

We use it for bringing data from all the different systems into it and then process it there. It is relatively faster. I always want the fastest speed, but despite all the claims made, it is fast. This product meets our scale and volume requirements.

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JC
Data Engineer at Prodxia

Hybrid columnar compression.

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reviewer1031826 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The storage capacity and the performance of Oracle Exadata are good. When comparing the performance to other technologies it is very good. I am satisfied with the management of the solution.

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it_user521580 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Principal Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

For me, the most valuable feature is the fact that it’s an integrated system of software and hardware together.

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it_user177636 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst ( Senior Oracle DBA) at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Smart Flash Cache
  • Storage Index
  • Smart Scan
  • Hybrid Columnar Compression
  • Oracle ASM
  • Security with encryption
  • Oracle platinum support
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it_user270906 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The intelligent features have been built to utilize the storage layer in a much better way.

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it_user701433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Oracle RAC / Exadata Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Smart Scan, HCC Compression, Storage Indexes, Flash Cache, Flash Log and the two server types, i.e., High Performance and High Capacity are the most valuable features.

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it_user687189 - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder/CTO/Chief Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The Exadata system is specifically optimized for database workloads. But
the key [Exadata specific] features that we leverage for our workloads is
Exadata Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and of
course all the 12c Oracle Database which are integrated with Exadata stack;
e.g, Multitenant/PDB.

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it_user521853 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Administrator at Qualys

I like mainly the performance. Also, we have enabled RAC clusters. That's one of the main things, as well as high availability. The performance and high availability are really awesome.

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it_user406893 - PeerSpot reviewer
PL/SQL Developer at a marketing services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a fast solution, though it does take some work to ensure that queries are offloading using bloom filters, etc.

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it_user1011 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Data Center at a insurance company with 51-200 employees
• Exadata provides great improvement in terms of read/write response time. The response time is approximately 10x the performance of a regular disk. • Tuning is automatic. • SQL operations run faster, because large I/O operations are replaced by group operations. • Ideal for data warehousing since it supports bulk load operations. • Good storage capacity View full review »
AS
Enterprise architect at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Oracle has reliable solutions and this one is no different.

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reviewer602496 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

The offloading of data to the SIM is the most valuable feature because it solves the issue of I/O.

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it_user259878 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer with 501-1,000 employees
  • Exadata Storage Server software
  • Smart Scan
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principa447546 - PeerSpot reviewer
President of the Board at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable feature is that you have the same familiar environment of an Oracle database but with the additional performance you get from this architecture.

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it_user1221 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Expert at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Exadata is Oracle's solution for a fully Engineered Integrated Hardware and Software platform for Oracle Databases. Extensive Storage level features such as Smart Scan, Flash Cache and Hybrid Columnar Compression. The Infiniband Switch is very fast for all communication channels. Excellent performance gains especially for large data warehouse types of applications. View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Oracle Exadata
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Oracle Exadata. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
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