Exasol vs. Lalilo

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.)

Given students whose behaviors can affect their ability to learn, Lalilo is well suited because it allows students to begin at their just right level and move ahead at their own pace. The fun factor is high enough that students stay engaged, even when they might not do so on other learning platforms. Students also enjoy comparing their badges, so for students who are motivated by competition with their friends, this works in their favor.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Differentiate Instruction
• Pinpoint areas of need for students
• Engaging for our struggling learners
• Allows students to progress/work on skills that they need

• 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.

• For my lower students, it would be nice to have more practice in alphabetical skills before moving on to reading.
• Sometimes the sound glitches out and we have to restart the lesson.

Incentivized

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)

Students do not need any training to use Lalilo. As a teacher, I did not need any training, either. It is a simple process to set up and very user friendly. Having used it for almost 2 years now, I have not needed to contact customer service for any issues.

Incentivized

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 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.

Lalilo is fun but there a sense of accountability. It really demonstrates that working hard has its rewards.

Incentivized

• 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.

• We have seen tremendous growth with some of our students
• Growth in lagging skills for students (close the gap)