1. Home
  2. Relational Databases
  3. Exasol Reviews
  4. User Review of Exasol
Exasol is so powerful it's fun.
December 01, 2020

Exasol is so powerful it's fun.

Peter Kioko | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Exasol

It used as the reporting and business intelligence backend for our primary financial products.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • SingleStore (formerly MemSQL) and Teradata Vantage Advanced SQL Engine (Teradata Database)
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.
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)
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.

Do you think Exasol delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Exasol's feature set?

Yes

Did Exasol live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Exasol go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Exasol again?

Yes

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.)