Dell PowerFlex vs. OpenText Vertica vs. Oracle Exadata

Definitely would recommend this unit or this family of units into most peoples organizations. Especially if you're starting fresh with a whole dedicated SAN and dont have to move a ton of data over to these (though that is possible, it is very messy). If you're moving from existing storage, then you will have to be prepared for some sore spots!

Incentivized

Vertica as a data warehouse to deliver analytics in-house and even to your client base on scale is not rivaled anywhere in the market. Frankly, in my experience it is not even close to equaled. Because it is such a powerful data warehouse, some people attempt to use it as a transactional database. It certainly is not one of those. Individual row inserts are slow and do not perform well. Deletes are a whole other story. RDBMS it is definitely not. OLAP it rocks.

Incentivized

• First, get the database on Oracle. If you are in an Oracle stack, it would be much better to use the Oracle products. If you are driving a Ferrari, you wouldn’t put a Mercedes engine in it. If you are writing a query, you cannot rely on other brands. Since I'm an architect, when I look for a product, I look for performance.
• The installation is easy because it comes out-of-the-box and you just start using it.
• Previous to Oracle Exadata, we were using a normal Oracle RAC service. We were just waiting for this product to come out.
• I'm currently writing a data warehouse on Exadata. Before this solution, we were aiming for this to be completed by 8 a.m., when our ETLs would finish. With the help of Exadata's special features, this was reduced to 3 a.m. This solution allows us to bring more data within the same time period. It provides us with more subject areas that provide more reports to our users. Our ETL times reduced to 65%, then to 50%.

Incentivized

• Gets all your (SAN) ducks in a row, and makes it easy with a single pane of glass
• The usual good dell support if you're paying for the right support level
• It can get expensive with options added but base price is pretty competitive

Incentivized

• Extremely fast query performance - Vertica is one of the fastest query engines out there.
• Scales to TBs - Scales reasonably well up to 10-20 nodes and 10 - 100s of TB of data.
• Easy to Use - Fairly easy to user, we made quite some headway with just 1 person running it for a while.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Costs are high, especially when having to replace multiple old SAN's with the one type
• There is alot of down time when you have to push updates out to the units
• Not sure we still have the full hang of all the functions as there's some pretty deep functions that are not explained well

Incentivized

• Could use some work on better integrating with cloud providers and open source technologies. For AWS you will find an AMI in the marketplace and recently a connector for loading data from S3 directly was created. With last release, integration with Kafka was added that can help.
• Managing large workloads (concurrent queries) is a bit challenging.
• Having a way to provide an estimate on the duration for currently executing queries / etc. can be helpful. Vertica provides some counters for the query execution engine that are helpful but some may find confusing.
• Unloading data over JDBC is very slow. We've had to come up with alternatives based on vsql, etc. Not a very clean, official on how to unload data.

Incentivized

• Integrating with different types of databases can be a challenge
• Having a hardware platform optimized to run specific database software surely comes with a price
• Single vendor to support same hardware and software will make migrating to different hardware and/or software become a hassle

Incentivized

Excellent machine for your database needs . Don’t have to think twice if you have the budget to own it

Incentivized

I haven't had any recent opportunity to reach out to Vertica support. From what I remember, I believe whenever I reached out to them the experience was smooth.

Incentivized

Vertica performs well when the query has good stats and is tuned well. Options for GUI clients are ugly and outdated. IO optimized: it's a columnar store with no indexing structures to maintain like traditional databases. The indexing is achieved by storing the data sorted on disk, which itself is run transparently as a background process.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Money saved in having a bunch of other competing storage units
• All kinds of time saved for our admins that have to deal with storage
• The units look good and give you that futurey data center vibe!

Incentivized

• Positive impact on ROI by being able to get customer insights in real-time.
• Positive ROI through reduced time to set-up and maintain Vertica instances.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized