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.
"Complete management occurs from one single address instead of different servers."
"Backup/Restore performance: Fast backups, fast restores (especially useful for creating clone environments)."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Exadata is its capabilities for storing and processing data. It is very good for our domain."
"The data replication is very good."
"The performance on the databases is good."
"We can use virtualization on Exadata."
"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."
"The product is flexible."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just need to follow the documentation."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"The most valuable features are sharing data, Time Travel, Zero Copy Cloning, performance, and speed."
"It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"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."
"The way it is built and designed is valuable. The way the shared model is built and the way it exploits the power of the cloud is very good. Certain features related to administration and management, akin to Oracle Flashback and all that, are very important for modern-day administration and management. It is also good in terms of managing and improving performance, indexing, and partitioning. It is sort of completely automated. Everything is essentially under the hood, and the engine takes care of it all. As a data warehouse on the cloud, Snowflake stands strong on its ground even though each of the cloud providers has its own data warehouse, such as Redshift for AWS or Synapse for Azure."
"Its performance is a big advantage. When you run a query, its performance is very good. The inbound and outbound share features are also very useful for sharing a particular database. By using these features, you can allow others to access the Snowflake database and query it, which is another advantage of this solution. It has good security, and we can easily integrate it. We can connect it with multiple source systems."
"Oracle Exadata could improve the platform performance tuning should be easier, automated, and user-friendly."
"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 have experienced some issues with processing unstructured data on Exadata. This is an important requirement for our AIML based use case. Reactive analytics data can not be prepared easily in Oracle Exadata."
"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."
"It's too expensive per terabyte. It's complex."
"The setup is a little bit complex. We would like to see the installation part get easier."
"Tech support sometimes takes some time to identify and rectify issues."
"The technical support is in need of improvement."
"It's not that flexible when compared to Oracle."
"Pricing is an issue for many customers."
"The cost of the solution could be reduced."
"Snowflake can improve its machine learning and AI capabilities."
"The cost efficiency and monitoring of this solution could be improved. It's easy to spend a lot on Snowflake and it does offer monitoring tools but they're pretty basic."
"The documentation could improve. They should provide architecture information."
"The cost is a bit high."
"Some SQL language functions could be included."
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 "Very fast, scalable, stable, and demonstrates good performance". 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