Quick Info on Exasol

This article highlights the major things to consider when planning, deploying, and operating an Exasol database as the heart of your data ecosystem.

Deploying Exasol requires careful consideration of different deployment options, number of clusters, redundancy, network, monitoring, and so on. Any new technology must also adhere to the security standards of your company. For this reason it is vital to understand how Exasol will fit into your data ecosystem, and how it will integrate with your existing workflows and processes.

Exasol is the high-performance, in-memory massively parallel processing (MPP) database specifically designed for analytics. From business-critical data applications to advanced analytics, Exasol helps you analyze large volumes of data faster than ever before, helping you to accelerate your BI and reporting, and to turn data into value..

Exasol supports the SQL standard ISO/IEC 9075:2023 (including all analytical functions) and a large selection of commonly-used Oracle SQL dialects.

Exasol offers the following deployment options:

  • Exasol On Cloud: Deploy Exasol as a native cloud application on Amazon Web Services (AWS), or install Exasol as an application on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform instances. For more information, see Exasol On Cloud.
  • Exasol On-Prem: Install Exasol as an application in your own environment. For more information, see Exasol On-Prem.

Licenses can be obtained directly from Exasol for all deployment options. For more details, see Licenses

Virtualization

We do not recommend deploying Exasol as a virtual machine in production scenarios. Virtualization using a hypervisor such as VirtualBox, VMWare, Hyper-V or KVM is only recommended for testing purposes.

You can connect and interact with Exasol by using popular SQL clients such as DBVisualizer and DBeaver. Exasol also includes the standard interface such as ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET, along with native connectors for a wide range of tools for various purposes such as business intelligence, data integration / ETL, programming languages, and query tools.

The Ecosystem Overview section provides you with a list of tools you can connect to Exasol.

Exasol allows you to load data from CSV/FBV files, data from other DBMS, Virtual schemas, and other file formats from cloud storage systems such as Parquet, ORC, Avro and so on.

To learn more about loading data into Exasol, refer to the Load Data section.

Exasol comes with a built-in storage management service, EXAStorage, and includes several powerful tools for administration and management of databases, clusters, and storage:

  • Exasol Deployment Tool (c4) - a command-line tool for creating and managing deployments
  • Administration API - a RESTful interface for common tasks such as adding and managing databases and clusters
  • ConfD - a powerful command-line interface for advanced administration tasks

Exasol provides a Raw Data license based on your contract with Exasol and your business requirements. The license specifies the maximum size of raw data that you can store across all databases in the cluster. This is the default license type.

The raw data volume corresponds to the data volume that is comparable to the size the data would have if stored as CSV files. If you exceed the licensed capacity, you cannot import any additional data unless you delete the data inside the database.

Audit data is not counted towards the raw data license limit.

For more details about how raw data size is determined, see Sizing for Data Types and Object Types.

For more general information about the licensing model in Exasol, see Licenses.

Business continuity encompasses the planning and readiness for serious incidents, disasters, or disruptions that could impact your business. The goals of a business continuity plan are to ensure that critical business functions can continue (for example, through redundancy) despite a disruption, and that data can be recovered in the case of system downtime.

Business continuity planning starts with an analysis and identification of critical and non-critical factors for incident recovery. Exasol supports various Business Continuity solutions such as Dual Data Center or Synchronous Dual Data Center. For detailed information, refer to the Business Continuity section.

Exasol includes various data security solutions to protect your data, such as:

  • Authentication methods like LDAP/AD, OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on
  • Access management (Database level, row/column level, cluster level)
  • Data encryption for data-in-motion and data-at-rest
  • Auditing.

Refer to the Data Security section for more information.

Having the same data stored on different nodes or volumes provide an additional layer of protection against data loss in the event of a hardware component or server failure. Configuring data redundancy in Exasol enables the replication of data between different nodes, enabling automatic failover mechanisms. Exasol recommends configuring a redundancy 2 for the data volumes.

To learn more about data volumes and how to enable redundancy in Exasol, refer to the Storage Management section.

To minimise the risk of data loss in case of a failure, you need to back up your database regularly. A well planned backup and restore strategy helps to prevent any data loss. Two essential parameters you need to keep in mind for an optimal data backup plan are Recovery Point Objective(RPO) and Recovery Time Objective(RTO).

For information on how to perform backup and restore, refer to the Backup and Restore section. Ffor information on business continuity plans in the case of a failure, refer to the Business Continuity section.

Exasol provides various free training to help you understand the working of Exasol, enhance your skills, and provide the necessary knowledge to maintain and manage your Exasol database.

Exasol recommends that each person using the Exasol database must take the Exasol Essentials course before working with the database. Additionally, after each major update, Exasol recommends taking the appropriate course or reading the documentation to familiarize yourself with the new features.

Visit our Exacademy page to learn more about the available courses and enroll in the free training.