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 most valuable feature is that you have the same familiar environment of an Oracle database but with the additional performance you get from this architecture."
"It is a scalable solution."
"They just have a lot of products, and they work well together."
"It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing."
"We can use virtualization on Exadata."
"Compression is a great feature, where one can really save a lot of storage."
"The technical support team are real professionals. I admire their technical skills and supports. Their supports are really admirable."
"The new Exadata x9m has an even higher speed of 100GBps connectivity."
"The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"The solution is stable."
"It is a very easy-to-use solution. It is user-friendly, and its setup time is very less."
"It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"It's user-friendly. It's SQL-driven. The fact that business can also go to this application and query because they know SQL is the biggest factor."
"Time travel is one feature that really helps us out."
"From a data warehouse perspective, it's an excellent all-round solution. It's very complete."
"The setup is a little bit complex. We would like to see the installation part get easier."
"The solution takes a lot of time to clone the environment. I would like to see some improvement in the cloning support or the time it takes on the storage side."
"The improvement could be made on the hardware level as the habit in the industry is to go better and faster and larger with every iteration."
"We used the support from Oracle Exadata to complete the implementation."
"There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements."
"Oracle Exadata could improve by having faster data retrieval. We receive data at four or five seconds and want to reduce that number to one second."
"Exadata would be improved with single dashboard visibility."
"The handling of temp space has room for improvement."
"Their strategy is just to leverage what you've got and put Snowflake in the middle. It does work well with other tools. You have to buy a separate reporting tool and a separate data loading tool, whereas, in some platforms, these tools are baked in. In the long-term, they'll need to add more direct partnerships to the ecosystem so that it's not like adding on tools around Snowflake to make it work. They can also consider including Snowflake native reporting tools versus partnering with other reporting tools. It would kind of change where they sit in the market."
"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."
"In future releases, it can also support full unstructured data."
"More data governance and access control features would be a welcome addition."
"The solution needs more connectors."
"I don't think that the AI tools in Snowflake are good."
"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."
"We are yet to figure out how to integrate tools, such as Liquibase, to release changes to our data warehouse model."
Oracle Exadata is ranked 2nd in Data Warehouse with 125 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 95 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