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.
"We like the tool’s features like Smart Scan, Hybrid Columnar Compression, and the TFA."
"The data replication is very good."
"What I like best about Oracle Exadata is its good performance. It's also a very fast solution."
"A very stable solution, which we have hardly any problems with."
"Exadata with the In-Memory option is several levels about SAP HANA."
"Parallelism is the most valuable feature."
"What I found most valuable in Oracle Exadata is its newer technology that gives better performance. It has more recent hardware and significant changes in the architecture, so it's better than older solutions."
"Oracle Exadata has very good hardware."
"The speed of data loading and being able to quickly create the environment are most valuable."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"The solution's computing time is less."
"It is a very well-distributed system. It has different data engines for different applications. Many applications can use different computational engines at the same time. In terms of data processing, the feeling was similar to working with a relational database but in a scalable way."
"It is a very good platform. It can handle structured and semi-structured data, and it can be used for your data warehouse or data lake. It can load and deal with any data that you have. It can extract data from an on-premises database or a website and make it available in the cloud. It has very fast implementation and integration as compared to other solutions. There is no need for the DBA to manage or do the day-to-day DBA tasks, which is one of the greatest things about it."
"It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just need to follow the documentation."
"My company wanted to have all our data in one single place and this what we use Snowflake for. Snowflake also allows us to build connectors to different data sources."
"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."
"We had issues with system restoration."
"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."
"Certification should also be improved. Today, Oracle doesn't certify applications with engineered systems."
"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."
"Oracle Exadata compatibility with the analytics could be better and the OBIEE could improve. Oracle BI to Exadata needs to be improved. Even if the full analytics practice for Oracle should be improved and when compared with other solutions it is weak."
"It is difficult to evaluate return-on-investment because of the way billing is handled for the product. This should be improved by oracle."
"The integration with third-party applications regarding access management security could be better."
"To ensure the proper functioning of Snowflake as an MDS, it relies heavily on other partner tools."
"It's difficult to know how to size everything correctly."
"The solution could use a little bit more UI."
"I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"I would like to see more transparency in data processing, ATLs, and compute areas - which should give more comfort to the end users."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
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