Exadata is Oracle’s fastest growing new product. Much of the growth of Exadata has come at the expense of specialized data warehouse appliance vendors. These vendors have published competitive comparisons to Exadata, claiming:

• Architecture is what really matters for performance
• Purpose-built data warehousing architectures perform best

The high-level architectural debate will go on forever because no vendor will ever admit to having an inferior architecture. Ultimately, customers should judge products by results, not architectural claims. The same vendors that claim architectural superiority don’t disclose basic performance metrics for their products since they fall well short of Exadata.