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Oracle Exadata

Score9.9 out of 10

200 Reviews and Ratings

What is Oracle Exadata?

Oracle Exadata is an enterprise database platform that runs Oracle Database workloads of any scale and criticality with high performance, availability, and security. Exadata’s scale-out design employs optimizations that let transaction processing, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads run faster. Consolidating diverse Oracle Database workloads on Exadata platforms in enterprise data centers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and multicloud environments helps organizations increase operational efficiency.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Multi-User Support (named login)

    Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.

    Category average: 9.4

  • Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)

    Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.

    Category average: 9

  • Single Sign-On (SSO)

    Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications

    Category average: 9.4

Areas for Improvement

  • Data Warehouse Management

    The effectiveness of the product’s tools for loading, transforming, sharing, and exploring data, schemas, and dependencies.

    Category average: 9.2

  • Self-Optimization

    The product’s capability to monitor and adjust internal metrics and systems to keep performance as high as possible.

    Category average: 6.6

  • Administrative Automation

    The product’s capacity to automate administrative tasks such as patching, scaling, and creating backups.

    Category average: 6.9

Highly powerful engineered Machine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Oracle Exadata to consolidate our enterprise databases on single platform . It provides low latency , excellent performance for any kind of applications. Both OLTP and OLAP application databases were hosted . It provides high redundancy and very good fault tolerance

Pros

  • Low latency 10X performance
  • Various compression features
  • Flexible configuration based on needs
  • Smart Scan , Flash storage , Storage indexing

Cons

  • Too expensive
  • Integration with third party

Return on Investment

  • Pretty expensive
  • Best to consolidate all our databases in one machine
  • Most powerful machine

Usability

Other Software Used

Oracle Database, Oracle ZFS, NetApp StorageGRID, VMware vSphere

Excellent Uniquely Designed DB Machine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Various database servers for Healthcare applications. Use cases span from typical transactional systems to data warehouse and analytics. Important criteria: database performance, data safety, 24x7 non-stop operations, High Availability. These are critical for real-time applications serving customers in healthcare industry.

Pros

  • High speed of SQL operations due to a unique design of Exadata with offloading of SQL processing to storage cells
  • Built-in High Availability of a DB server due to it's base architecture of a multi-node Oracle Real Application Cluster
  • High overall sever performance due to its use of a proprietary "Smart Cache" feature utilizing a high speed flash memory
  • Excellent scalability of a DB server by adding cluster nodes as well as expanding it into a network of serially connected clusters

Cons

  • The process of patching and upgrade of Exadata server components could be improved with a goal to minimize the overall effort, make it fully automated and transparent.
  • Improved guidelines and possibly more sophisticated tools for sizing of new Exadata servers for migration from old legacy hardware.

Return on Investment

  • One of the central critical systems was migrated from a large 4-node Oracle RAC running on legacy hardware. This application was experiencing severe performance issues literally causing loss of service for numerous customers. Once it was migrated to a 2-node Exadata server, its average performance improved almost by a level of magnitude, therefore eliminating any signs of application slowness.
  • Numerous application databases were migrated to Exadata servers which reduced the overall cost of hardware due to Exadata's price structure.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AHV

Other Software Used

Oracle Application Testing Suite

Highly Scalable and Elastic Database Workload Platform: Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, I use Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service to run an extensive range of enterprise workloads with automation which reduces operational costs and time. Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service is used across the entire organization, but not in all business units.

Pros

  • Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service provides elasticity and scalability.
  • Consolidation of thousands databases in one unified solution.
  • It involves less time to run analytics workloads.

Cons

  • Lack of enough documentation and whitepapers for features.

Return on Investment

  • Scalability allows us to make rapid decisions by unlocking and connecting insights to business context.
  • Improving performance through indexing.
  • Reduce the cost of creating a large data warehouse by compressing uncompressed databases.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Redshift and Apache Hive

Oracle Exadata Database Machine offers in-memory performance for our DB transactions

Pros

  • High Speed Computing
  • History Tables

Cons

  • Implementation of temporary tables
  • SQL Developer attempt to convert T-SQL to PL-SQL could be better

Return on Investment

  • Standardization of hardware
  • Standardization of software

Alternatives Considered

IBM Db2 Big SQL, SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL Server

Other Software Used

SAP PowerDesigner, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB Atlas

Exadata does better than most

Pros

  • RAC/clustered database technology
  • RMAN duplicate and cloning
  • Full sh/bash/ksh support
  • Generally faster i/o throughput versus non-exadata

Cons

  • Patching can often become quite involved and convoluted. It should be more transparent and straightforward.
  • Storage metrics can be difficult and time consuming to obtain.
  • Basic administrative functions can be hard to repair when discovered.
  • Vendor support can take a while to obtain. Generally several attempts are necessary to reach the right area of vendor expertise.

Return on Investment

  • Unfortunately Exadata can be extremely high cost, especially for the higher tiered levels of support.
  • It does well in needed only a few machines to build and support hundreds of discrete databases.
  • Patching can be burdensome and negate cost savings as the time lost can be considerable.

Alternatives Considered

IBM AIX and HP Data Center Outsourcing

Other Software Used

Oracle Enterprise Manager, F-Secure Business Suite, Chrome Remote Desktop