Oracle Database Appliance vs Oracle Exadata

If you look for high availability and reliability with less budget ODA’s are for you. ODA’s are powerful little machines that don’t require extensive DBA knowledge to manage them. In recent years they have also added the ability to do virtual machines on top of them which introduces some other awesome opportunities (OAM/OIM in a box!)

Exadata Database Machine gives you extreme scalability and performance for your online transaction processing, data warehousing and other database applications. You will gain a pre-configured system that is already optimized for any workload and database application. You can get a system that is able to give you 1.5 million input-output operations every second. There are also 150 terabytes of uncompressed user data limit per rack and you also get complete redundancy for high availability.

On the other hand, Oracle Database Appliance X4-2 allows you to deploy it easily and quickly. This gives you clustered database system that is highly available. The Oracle Database Appliance comes with Oracle Appliance Manager and Oracle Linux already installed. That saves you time and also simplifies deployment, support and maintenance.

The Oracle Database Appliance has fewer features, but it is definitely comparable with Exadata as far as high availability is concerned. Oracle Database Appliance, however, has a cheaper price tag making it an attractive solution for smaller businesses or those without enough capital, or those who could not justify the costs of Exadata for their businesses. Exadata starts selling at six figures for the quarter rack, while Oracle Database Appliance prices can go as low as $50,000 especially for earlier releases.

While Oracle Database Appliance X4-2 gives you an easy way to set up your databases that are highly available with reduced planned and unplanned downtime, without worrying too much about the cost, it does not give you the outstanding performance that you can see from Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4-8. So you really need to take note of your operations and needs to see whether an Oracle Appliance X4-2 is enough for your operations. Or if you should invest more in an Exadata Database Machine. 

For more detailed hands-on feedback go to this link