Oracle Exadata Review

I like its reliability. I like the storage cell because of the amount of RAM and memory. It has the ability to do a lot of things, so that it doesn't transfer as much data out as other systems do.

Once we went to Exadata, we started doing statistics on a weekly basis. Between the two of them, things have stabilized quite a bit; didn't need as much tuning, and so it required less DBA time to do that. DBAs were freed up to do other work.

We have a 2X. Because I don't know what the 6X does, I don't know what additional features I’d like to see them include in future releases.

It's very stable and very reliable.

I work with the PeopleSoft systems on the databases and it's doing just fine. I don't have to scale out.

I don't believe we’ve had to use technical support. We had a little bit of help at the beginning to get everything installed; after that, it just ran.

Someone in the upper management decided to spend some money, and we had the machines; he said use them.

I was allowed to help with some of the initial setup. Most of it was handled by the DBA core team; what I did was give some ideas on how we ought to do some things.

What size of database are you working with? What kind of reliability and stability do you need? Is the cost worth what they would get out of the stability.

I like the Oracle database. I find Oracle as a whole has a very stable database. As far as the Exadata is concerned, as I’ve mentioned, I didn't have a choice in the matter. Nonetheless, if given my druthers, I would stick with it because it is reliable, even though it is kind of expensive.

My rating reflects its reliability. If I was rating it just on cost, I would rate it much lower.