Azure Synapse Analytics is described as the former Azure SQL Data Warehouse, evolved, and as a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives users the freedom to query data using either serverless or provisioned resources, at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.
$4,700
per month 5000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Oracle Exadata
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
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…
$2.90
Per Unit
Pricing
Azure Synapse Analytics
Oracle Exadata
Editions & Modules
Tier 1
$4,700
per month 5,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 2
$9,200
per month 10,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 3
$21,360
per month 24,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 4
$50,400
per month 60,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 5
$117,000
per month 150,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Tier 6
$259,200
per month 360,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Database Server
$2.9032
Per Unit
Quarter Rack
$14.5162
Per Unit
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Synapse Analytics
Oracle Exadata
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Synapse Analytics
Oracle Exadata
Features
Azure Synapse Analytics
Oracle Exadata
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
It's well suited for large, fastly growing, and frequently changing data warehouses (e.g., in startups). It's also suited for companies that want a single, relatively easy-to-use, centralized cloud service for all their data needs. Larger, more structured organizations could still benefit from this service by using Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools, knowing that costs will be much higher than other solutions. I think this product is not suited for smaller, simpler workloads (where an Azure SQL Database and a Data Factory could be enough) or very large scenarios, where it may be better to build custom infrastructure.
Oracle Exadata is well-suited for environments where massive performance for Oracle databases is required. Storage indexes reduce the unnecessary I/O. Smart Flash Cache accelerates random reads/writes.
Our OLTP application demands very high concurrency. Multi-node Exadata provides high availability and zero downtime during DB patching. It comes with lots of built-in automations, so it reduces many routine tasks for sysadmins, like network, storage, and VM configuration, and it also reduces many Oracle DBA tasks, like Oracle software installation, patching, and upgrades.
Quick to return data. Queries in a SQL data warehouse architecture tend to return data much more quickly than a OLTP setup. Especially with columnar indexes.
Ability to manage extremely large SQL tables. Our databases contain billions of records. This would be unwieldy without a proper SQL datawarehouse
Backup and replication. Because we're already using SQL, moving the data to a datawarehouse makes it easier to manage as our users are already familiar with SQL.
Oracle Database : Deliver industry-leading security, high availability and scalability with Oracle Database, which has been significantly enhanced to take advantage of the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers.
Exadata Smart Scan : Improve query performance by offloading intensive query processing and data mining scoring to scalable intelligent storage servers.
Smart Flash Cache : Transparently cache 'hot' read and write data to fast solid-state storage, improving query response times and throughput. Exadata systems use the latest PCI flash technology rather than flash disks. PCI flash delivers ultra-high performance by placing flash directly on the high speed PCI bus rather than behind slow disk controllers.
Hybrid Columnar Compression : Reduce the size of data warehousing tables by 10x, and archive tables by 50x, to improve performance and lower storage costs for primary, standby, and backup databases. Query high, query low, archive high and archive low.
Infiniband Network : Connect multiple Oracle Exadata Database Machines using the InfiniBand fabric to form a larger single system image configuration. Each InfiniBand link provides 40 Gigabits of bandwidth–many times higher than traditional storage or server networks.
Petabyte Scalability : Easily scale data warehouse to support enterprise data growth.
With Azure, it's always the same issue, too many moving parts doing similar things with no specialisation. ADF, Fabric Data Factory and Synapse pipeline serve the same purpose. Same goes for Fabric Warehouse and Synapse SQL pools.
Could do better with serverless workloads considering the competition from databricks and its own fabric warehouse
Synapse pipelines is a replica of Azure Data Factory with no tight integration with Synapse and to a surprise, with missing features from ADF. Integration of warehouse can be improved with in environment ETl tools
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.
The data warehouse portion is very much like old style on-prem SQL server, so most SQL skills one has mastered carry over easily. Azure Data Factory has an easy drag and drop system which allows quick building of pipelines with minimal coding. The Spark portion is the only really complex portion, but if there's an in-house python expert, then the Spark portion is also quiet useable.
I am comparing Exadata with the Oracle RAC database experience. In addition to Oracle RAC features, Exadata provides automatic performance optimization through Smart Scan and storage indexes. Deep integration with the Oracle ecosystem and tight coupling with Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring and management. Some downsides of Exadata are: a steep learning curve, concepts like cell offloading, IORM, and flash cache behavior aren’t intuitive initially. Operating Exadata requires specialized DBA skills.
Microsoft does its best to support Synapse. More and more articles are being added to the documentation, providing more useful information on best utilizing its features. The examples provided work well for basic knowledge, but more complex examples should be added to further assist in discovering the vast abilities that the system has.
In comparing Azure Synapse to the Google BigQuery - the biggest highlight that I'd like to bring forward is Azure Synapse SQL leverages a scale-out architecture in order to distribute computational processing of data across multiple nodes whereas Google BigQuery only takes into account computation and storage.
Oracle Exadata Database Machine had the best performance overall hands down. It clearly beat the competition and we were seeing 1000X improvement on SAP HANA. Oracle Exadata Database Machine beat that without us refactoring our code. To achieve that in HANA, we had to refactor the code somewhat. Now this was for our limited POC of 5 use cases. Given the large number of stored procedures we had in Sybase, we need to capture more production metrics but we are seeing incredible performance.
Licensing fees is replaced with Azure subscription fee. No big saving there
More visibility into the Azure usage and cost
It can be used a hot storage and old data can be archived to data lake. Real time data integration is possible via external tables and Microsoft Power BI
Single support from a single vendor with both machine and database from Oracle, which is costing us less.
With Exadata, we need less technical manpower and less technical support. A business transaction with the integrated and centralized database helps us focus on other business needs.
We don't need to buy additional licenses and Hardware for the next 3 to 5 years.
