Crystal vs. Exasol

All of our applications server in the new company that we bought are windows based, despite that there are other alternative to build the report and dashboard, it is something that has worked wonder for us, apart from it is only available in Windows and indexing data that might eat the resource, I still see the application as one of the major player for reporting

Exasol is suited to applications requiring fewer & larger queries (reporting/data analytics/business intelligence tools). Its per-query overhead makes it unsuitable as an operational database (those are optimized for many & smaller queries.)

• Consolidate data from several data sources
• Low to no code report generation
• Configurable

• We have found Exasol to be very fast at summarizing large data sets. It has been a great backend for both reporting tools and data analytics/business intelligence. Combined with the fact that data import is also very fast it makes it ideal for a real-time ELT architecture.
• Exasol is low maintenance. No indexes to maintain (The database auto-manages them) and very little tuning is required.
• Query processing is optimized for high throughput and high parallelization. This means that even under high loads performance degrades gracefully as opposed to having "pile-ups" and "meltdowns". This has made it a very reliable database for us.

• This is bound for Windows OS, hard to find similar alternative on other OSs
• Be careful in Indexing your data, as it will consume resources

• Exasol doesn't have some of the advanced enterprise-y features found in some other large corporate database systems (e.g. native row-level and column-level security). However it's pretty customizable (SQL pre-processing, virtual schemas, powerful user-defined-function frameworks) so many of these features can be implemented manually.

I gave it 9/10 instead of 10/10 only because it lacks in a few advanced enterprise features that require manual workarounds. Otherwise our users have had no problem getting up to speed with it (other than SQL syntax issues that are specific to it, but that's true of any DB)

I have had only positive experiences with their support. They are fast, knowledgeable, and courteous. Online support requests get picked up within hours. I've only once had to use their hotline and that was for an emergency. There was even one minor non-security bug report that I reported and which they fixed in the following week's minor release. I was quite impressed.

We tried to explore other options but we didn't explore other options too long as it will risk our business process and business outcome, as what we want from the processes in both reports and dashboard are giving us a satisfactory result, so familiarity is why we still using it till today and some foreseeable future

We looked at some others too, but was 5 yrs ago so I don't recall the list. Exasol had the best performance per cost, outstanding performance, and was easy to evaluate. Even their community addition running on my laptop was faster than our existing reporting solution.

• Without the application, our lending business will be in complete stop, as our applications are wrote in Windows based
• We are processing 300 Loans/Month, taking it as $10000 per loan, having this not working properly will cost potential $150.000 revenue

• When we first migrated to Exasol (from a MySQL-backed reporting tool) our clients spent over an order of magnitude less time waiting on reports and since then it has opened up possibilities for reporting and analyzing data that were simply not possible beforehand.