Likelihood to Recommend 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.)
Read full review Less Appropriate Scenario: 1) Small Scale or Low Budget Projects 2) Organizations with limited expertise in cloud technologies may find the learning curve steep, especially if they are not familiar with the IBM Cloud platform 3) If database requirements are highly dynamic and change frequently, the comprehensive features and management provided by IBM Cloud Databases might be overkill. A more flexible, self-managed solution could be preferable for adapting to rapid changes.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review The ease of setup was effortless. For anyone with development experience, a few simple questions such as name and login data will get you set up. The web application to manage cluster settings, billing settings and even introspect the data was simple and most importantly worked all the time. This can not always be said for web interfaces of other products. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Better cost reports, before just increasing to another tier, thus increasing the price. This is critical for early stage startups, where budget is tight. Add more data center options. As a comparison, a similar service, Aiven.io has dozen more options than Compose (basically all big cloud providers). We moved from AWS to Digital Ocean, which made us stop using Compose, since Compose forces us to be either on IBM or AWS. Read full review Likelihood to Renew IBM is our trusted partner which never failed to meet our expectations. Stability, efficiency, usability and security is a must have for our business which is fully provided by IBM Cloud Databases
Read full review Usability 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)
Read full review It is great the only things I have stumbled upon is the non standard port 80 they use and sometimes expired SSL certificate.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Support is helpful enough, but we haven't always had questions answered in a satisfactory manner. At one time we realized that Compose had stopped taking database snapshots on its two-per-day schedule, and had in fact not taken one for many days. Support recognized the problem and it was fixed, but the lack of proactive checks and the inability to share exactly what happened has caused us to look elsewhere for production work loads
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review The reason why I choose IBM Cloud Databases is that the IBM cloud toolset is already being used in other functions of the company and by using IBM Cloud Databases, the other cloud tools are better embedded and integrated. If the company is set to use amazon tools, I would go for rds.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Prove use cases prior to administering entire platform, obtain ROI faster Able to achieve the technological components of our advanced analytics team without full scale purchase of AI platform Developed several studies to prove out cloud Db value, speed to deploy Read full review ScreenShots