Exasol vs. Percona Server for MySQL

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.)

Percona Server for MySQL covers 100% of our requirements in terms of our OLTP traffic and provides the High Availability levels required through a typical primary and 2 replica's using semi-synchronous replication. We're able to scale our writes using sharding, but a true distributed database would be a great option on top of this. In terms of OLAP traffic, we leverage columns stores available, but Percona Server fairs well

• 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.

• Faster than other server solutions
• Installation and configuration process is easy from the user's standpoint
• Easy to learn and good support

Incentivized

• 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.

• Better documentation
• A better UI

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)

It is easy to install and use. Using it along with Percona Monitoring and Management makes it even easier to use.

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 are using opensource so we have not used customer support.

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.

Performance and stability sets Percona Server for MySQL apart from the rest. Percona embraces the upstream version and contributes towards the upstream version making MySQL stronger on two fronts and thus having a much larger community. Many quality contributions have been made by Percona into the base code. Percona provides great tools to support Percona Server for MySQL and this makes the monitoring and management easier

• 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.

• At the performance level, it maintains and even improves other open-source databases such as MariaDB or some commercial ones such as Oracle.
• If we compare it with MySQL, we could have up to 50% improvement in performance.
• For some small companies or startups, the price of the complete solution and the support can be a bit high.

Incentivized