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 tool's performance is good."
"Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement."
"We like the tool’s features like Smart Scan, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and the TFA."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is the integration with other solutions, such as SAN storage and shared VLAN network."
"Oracle has reliable solutions and this one is no different."
"Oracle Exadata has very good hardware."
"The product is flexible."
"The technical support team are real professionals. I admire their technical skills and supports. Their supports are really admirable."
"From a data warehouse perspective, it's an excellent all-round solution. It's very complete."
"The cloning functionality has been the most valuable. I have been able to completely copy databases. The data sharing concept is also useful. As compared to, for example, SAP, Snowflake is a lot more open, and it allows a lot more connectivity for other providers than an SAP ecosystem."
"It is a very easy-to-use solution. It is user-friendly, and its setup time is very less."
"Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."
"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available."
"It is a cloud solution with many useful features. It has the data science capability. It can transform data and prepare data for a data science project with scalability."
"The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power."
"The Mbps they have established is quite a bit faster than any other data warehouse."
"I have found Oracle Exadata to be scalable. However, you have to purchase more hardware, such as memory."
"I liked Spark, but it was discontinued when Exadata L6 came back. I loved it, and I wish they would bring back Spark integration."
"We need a monitoring tool which can in one place, where we can manage, monitor the entire Exadata components."
"We had issues with system restoration."
"It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions."
"The performance could 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."
"Patching must be simplified."
"Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."
"There is a need for improvements in the documentation, this would allow more people to switch over to this solution."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
"Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."
"It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data."
Oracle Exadata is ranked 2nd in Data Warehouse with 124 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 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 Greenplum, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Dremio. 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