Oracle Exadata

High Speed Computing

History Tables

Implementation of temporary tables

SQL Developer attempt to convert T-SQL to PL-SQL could be better

Zero downtime for Oracle patches

Faster I/O as compared to non-exadata

Scripting using bash and sh

Patching is complex because of zero downtime

Configuration is complex

Hardware needs improvement

RAC/clustered database technology

RMAN duplicate and cloning

Full sh/bash/ksh support

Generally faster i/o throughput versus non-exadata

Patching can often become quite involved and convoluted. It should be more transparent and straightforward.

Storage metrics can be difficult and time consuming to obtain.

Basic administrative functions can be hard to repair when discovered.

Vendor support can take a while to obtain. Generally several attempts are necessary to reach the right area of vendor expertise.

The transaction process is very fast.

Scalable and reliable.

The best IO performance for large data.

Hardware support needs improvement.

Configuration should be easy, and customers should be able to handle it without experts.

It should also be available with the Solaris operating system.

Fast.

Effective.

Easy to migrate.

Can be time-consuming in the beginning.

Customize-able for specific functionality optimized for combination of online transaction or analytical processing.

Ability to serve mix workloads with resource management feature enables prioritizing allocation for certain workload.

Scale-able on-premise with compatibility for cloud deployment offers flexible solution for organization considering to transition from on-premise solution.

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

Increased performance of queries without indexes.

Maximize usage of Oracle Database licenses.

Offload SQL queries to storage.

Upgrade Infiniband to 100Gb.

Better service by Platinum Services.

Database compression is excellent.

12 C containers for VM databases.

Would be nice to have a better connection with different vendors or external storage or products.

Storage cell offload

Full table scans

Manages itself

Easier to add storage - it only gets shipped with so much and you have to purchase additional storage. That's not cheap, and they have to be installed.

[Could be] less expensive

Cell smart-scans.

Storage indexing.

OS monitoring.

SNMP configuration.

Integration with OEM.

Availability.

Performance.

Security.

Time to provision - It takes a whole village to provision a brand new Exadata. Would be great if the time to provision could be decreased.

Sparse clone helps us to quickly provision the dev/ test databases in less than 30 minutes and also saves storage.

Compression features in Exadata greatly helped us to save storage and improve performance.

Redundancy at every level in Exadata keeps our Oracle databases always up.

Platinum patching support is not as good as we expect.

Performance in running the database

Fast execution and easy to plug in

All in one solution

Scalability and upgrades

Allowing to run with VMware

Upgrade from old machine to new one. If you have an old machine, it is quite hard to upgrade them as Oracle withdraws some products after a new release. So, it is not cool for a customer who wants an upgrade but has to buy a new machine because the old one doesn’t exist anymore.

Mandatory installations from Oracle

Group shared space offers easy management and flexibility.

Consistent response times, faster than the vendor replaced by Oracle.

Oracle SQL Developer is full featured and intuitive for accessing Exadata.

The learning curve for syntax (aliasing, dates, etc) is steeper than some database vendors.

Initially had issues with response times but this was resolved with some configuration changes.

It runs analytical workloads much faster.

The HCC compression helps to reduce the storage cost and increase storage efficiency

Ideal platform to consolidate database.

It's difficult to find the cons.

Entry cost may be high but if you compare overall cost with performance, then it's not a big factor.

It does not support legacy database version.

Speeds up backup and restore.

Improved performance for payroll processing

Platinum support and proactive monitoring of database hardware

Batch processing performance improvement.

Platinum support patching has suffered lately in performance of the patching event

Cost for additional applications such as RAC

Cost of the hardware and support

Oracle Database : Deliver industry-leading security, high availability and scalability with Oracle Database, which has been significantly enhanced to take advantage of the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers.

Exadata Smart Scan : Improve query performance by offloading intensive query processing and data mining scoring to scalable intelligent storage servers.

Smart Flash Cache : Transparently cache 'hot' read and write data to fast solid-state storage, improving query response times and throughput. Exadata systems use the latest PCI flash technology rather than flash disks. PCI flash delivers ultra-high performance by placing flash directly on the high speed PCI bus rather than behind slow disk controllers.

Hybrid Columnar Compression : Reduce the size of data warehousing tables by 10x, and archive tables by 50x, to improve performance and lower storage costs for primary, standby, and backup databases. Query high, query low, archive high and archive low.

Infiniband Network : Connect multiple Oracle Exadata Database Machines using the InfiniBand fabric to form a larger single system image configuration. Each InfiniBand link provides 40 Gigabits of bandwidth–many times higher than traditional storage or server networks.

Petabyte Scalability : Easily scale data warehouse to support enterprise data growth.

There's nothing bad to say about Exadata. It's stable, durable, and always up and running. My DBAs do online patches and online backup.

I would like to see more database features and maybe more archiving features, because we need to do data archiving. I would like to see additional database memory.

It could be cheaper. :-)

Oracle is able to take a lot of data and put it into concise reports.

Oracle is super fast, for the amount at data it needs to contain and access at any time.

It might just be Banner, but the user interface is clunky when you're just getting started to learn it quickly and easily. It would be great if Banner had more customer service help lines as well.

Performance

Cloud Service

Storage

Flexibility to make changes without Oracle

The smart scan and cell offloading churn through massive amounts of data in a far more efficient and timely manner than any other Oracle database platform option available.

We did not have to change any application code to deploy on Exadata. We never allowed optimizer hints in our application code so we had zero issues when we upgraded.

We actually were able to consolidate many databases onto a single Exadata box - far more than we had ever expected.

I wish Exadata costs were just a little lower to overcome new users initial price shock. But once you see it in action the issue disappears.

I wish the Exadata technology were available on non-Oracle hardware/servers. In theory it should be able to be done on other servers, but it's blocked by Oracle it seems.

The new Exadata Express in the cloud is misleading, it does not have full smart scan capabilities. So people who try to experiment with Exadata first on the cloud may not see the real benefit and not understand why.