We performed a comparison between Oracle Exadata and Snowflake based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Snowflake wins out in this comparison, as it has a better user rating regarding both ease of deployment and pricing.
"The data replication is very good."
"The business intelligence is very good."
"The product is flexible."
"Backup/Restore performance: Fast backups, fast restores (especially useful for creating clone environments)."
"It offers a significant advantage for accommodating a large number of users."
"Oracle is known to be the number one in their industry; the help and support, the features they are giving the clients comparing to other databases, the new technology, the provide a good solution."
"The tool's performance is good."
"We can use virtualization on Exadata."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"It is a highly scalable solution. There is no limit on storage or computing."
"Time travel is one feature that really helps us out."
"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."
"From a data warehouse perspective, it's an excellent all-round solution. It's very complete."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"For us, the virtual warehousing is likely the most valuable aspect."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"The management monitoring tools are quite important and an area that needs some improvement."
"I liked Spark, but it was discontinued when Exadata L6 came back. I loved it, and I wish they would bring back Spark integration."
"There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements."
"A room for improvement in Oracle Exadata is that it's not very easy to use in a microservices environment. It's not easy to split databases, and if this was easier to do in Oracle Exadata, it would make the solution better. What I'd like to see in the next release of Oracle Exadata is for it to become more modular, so you can use it in a context where the data layer is spread between many independent services."
"The analytics features must be improved."
"We have a little trepidation with the system as it does have a learning curve. Also changing to a binary logging format for us feels like retrograde motion, but sadly almost all Linux variants have moved in this direction."
"Sometimes it takes too long time to get help with technical issues."
"The customization can sometimes be difficult to achieve."
"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
"It doesn't enforce typical relational database constraints. Quite expensive."
"These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that. With those errors, you don't have permissions."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
"The solution needs more connectors."
"They don't have any SLAs in place. It would be better if they did."
"If we can have a feature where the results can be moved to different tabs, so that I can compare the results with earlier queries before applying the changes, it would be great."
Oracle Exadata is ranked 2nd in Data Warehouse with 125 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. Oracle Exadata is rated 8.4, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Oracle Exadata writes "Offers a variety of valuable features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Oracle Exadata is most compared with Oracle Database Appliance, Teradata, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Amazon Redshift and VMware Tanzu Data Services, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Matillion ETL. See our Oracle Exadata vs. Snowflake report.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors and best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
This is a large and complex question and depends on the use case and scale. Each platform has its advantages and there are significant pros and cons for each platform. I am an independent consultant; I teach courses about these platforms and how to select one; and I advise clients.
If you would like to have a discussion about your requirements, the tradeoffs, and how to go about getting the best platform for your business, please email me at richard@wintercorp.com or book me online (no charge) at solvethepuzzle.biz