Exadata Database is a scalable, private database server that is completely isolated from other tenants. It can be used to run all database services, including OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), DW (Data Warehousing), DR (Disaster Recovery), and In-Memory Data Analytics.
The physical server consists of Storage Cells, Database Compute Nodes, and Infiniband Switches.
Exadata Servers offer the following features:
- Automatic self-service quarterly patching.
- Automatic scaling of resources.
- Automatic backups in encrypted format.
- RAC (Real Application Cluster) for failover.
- ASM (Automatic Storage Management) for mirroring disks and storage servers.
- RMAN (Recovery Manager) for backups and restoration.
- Flashback Database for rolling back user errors at the database or row level.
- Data Guard for failover to secondary Exadata Servers.
- Smart Scans to push SQL processing to the storage tier, improving query performance by reading data directly from disks.
- Storage Index.
- IORM (I/O Resource Manager) to manage I/O operations.
- Smart Flash Logging to reduce logging latency for OLTP and high-volume transactions, utilizing Flash Memory and high-speed RAM.
- Exadata provides dedicated hardware, and users can monitor resources using the Oracle Management Cloud or Enterprise Manager (EM) console.