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Oracle Exadata

Score9.8 out of 10

200 Reviews and Ratings

What is Oracle Exadata?

Oracle Exadata is an enterprise database platform that runs Oracle Database workloads of any scale and criticality with high performance, availability, and security. Exadata’s scale-out design employs optimizations that let transaction processing, analytics, machine learning, and mixed workloads run faster. Consolidating diverse Oracle Database workloads on Exadata platforms in enterprise data centers, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and multicloud environments helps organizations increase operational efficiency.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Multi-User Support (named login)

    Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.

    Category average: 9.4

  • Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)

    Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.

    Category average: 9.7

  • Data model creation

    Ability to create and maintain data models using a graphical tool to define relationships between data

    Category average: 9.4

Areas for Improvement

  • Administrative Automation

    The product’s capacity to automate administrative tasks such as patching, scaling, and creating backups.

    Category average: 7.4

  • Single Sign-On (SSO)

    Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications

    Category average: 9

  • Visualization

    The product’s support and tooling for analysis and visualization of data.

    Category average: 7.3

Oracle Exadata as Cloud-Native Database in AWSOracle DatabaseAWS.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

One of the motivations for using Oracle Exadata is its availability on AWS as a cloud service. Oracle Exadata service is available on AWS as the Oracle Database@AWS service. Because we are already using Oracle RAC in the On-premises Data Center, we wanted similar multi-node Oracle RAC availability in AWS/Azure. We have been using the Oracle database features extensively in

our products. With growing customers, data, and transaction volumes, we are seeing Exadata as a workload beast that provides the best Oracle database performance optimization. Because Oracle Exadata comes with a large number of machines and storage, database consolidation has been another reason to choose it.

Pros

  • Engineered system, well optimized for running Oracle database.
  • High Availability and Scalability.
  • Database Performance.
  • Huge size of Hardware like CPU, RAM and storage.

Cons

  • Exadata comes as an appliance so doesn’t support much customization.
  • I couldn’t install the latest python version on this machine.
  • Better Oracle support.

Return on Investment

  • Provides Oracle RAC capability running in the Public cloud like AWS, Azure.
  • Best-in-class appliance to run the Oracle workload, which provides performance, scalability, and high availability.
  • However, Exadata is expensive very service, it takes several years to get ROI.
  • One should be careful about moving to Exadata, as most use cases can be solved with Oracle RAC.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Database

Other Software Used

Amazon Aurora, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), PostgreSQL, Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL

Highly powerful engineered Machine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Oracle Exadata to consolidate our enterprise databases on single platform . It provides low latency , excellent performance for any kind of applications. Both OLTP and OLAP application databases were hosted . It provides high redundancy and very good fault tolerance

Pros

  • Low latency 10X performance
  • Various compression features
  • Flexible configuration based on needs
  • Smart Scan , Flash storage , Storage indexing

Cons

  • Too expensive
  • Integration with third party

Return on Investment

  • Pretty expensive
  • Best to consolidate all our databases in one machine
  • Most powerful machine

Usability

Other Software Used

Oracle Database, Oracle ZFS, NetApp StorageGRID, VMware vSphere

Excellent Uniquely Designed DB Machine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Various database servers for Healthcare applications. Use cases span from typical transactional systems to data warehouse and analytics. Important criteria: database performance, data safety, 24x7 non-stop operations, High Availability. These are critical for real-time applications serving customers in healthcare industry.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • The process of patching and upgrade of Exadata server components could be improved with a goal to minimize the overall effort, make it fully automated and transparent.
  • Improved guidelines and possibly more sophisticated tools for sizing of new Exadata servers for migration from old legacy hardware.

Return on Investment

  • One of the central critical systems was migrated from a large 4-node Oracle RAC running on legacy hardware. This application was experiencing severe performance issues literally causing loss of service for numerous customers. Once it was migrated to a 2-node Exadata server, its average performance improved almost by a level of magnitude, therefore eliminating any signs of application slowness.
  • Numerous application databases were migrated to Exadata servers which reduced the overall cost of hardware due to Exadata's price structure.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AHV

Other Software Used

Oracle Application Testing Suite

Highly Scalable and Elastic Database Workload Platform: Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, I use Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service to run an extensive range of enterprise workloads with automation which reduces operational costs and time. Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service is used across the entire organization, but not in all business units.

Pros

  • Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service provides elasticity and scalability.
  • Consolidation of thousands databases in one unified solution.
  • It involves less time to run analytics workloads.

Cons

  • Lack of enough documentation and whitepapers for features.

Return on Investment

  • Scalability allows us to make rapid decisions by unlocking and connecting insights to business context.
  • Improving performance through indexing.
  • Reduce the cost of creating a large data warehouse by compressing uncompressed databases.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Redshift and Apache Hive

Oracle Exadata Database Machine offers in-memory performance for our DB transactions

Pros

  • High Speed Computing
  • History Tables

Cons

  • Implementation of temporary tables
  • SQL Developer attempt to convert T-SQL to PL-SQL could be better

Return on Investment

  • Standardization of hardware
  • Standardization of software

Alternatives Considered

IBM Db2 Big SQL, SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL Server

Other Software Used

SAP PowerDesigner, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB Atlas