Migrating from older versions
Learn about the main differences between Exasol 7.1 and the newest Exasol versions.
The new architecture that was introduced in Exasol 8 provides many enhancements, including more flexibility to deploy your database on the platform of your choice
In 2025, Exasol introduced a new lifecycle and release cadence. For more information, see Product life cycle.
Software and OS decoupling
Exasol no longer includes an operating system. Instead, Exasol is provided as a Linux application that you install on on your own hardware or virtual environment, using a Linux distribution of your choice.
For more details about the supported Linux distributions and other system requirements when installing Exasol as an application, see System Requirements.
New administration tools
The old EXAoperation administration tool is no longer included. Exasol instead provides several powerful administration interfaces that enable you to deploy and manage your databases and clusters using both built-in and external tools. The administration interfaces are available on all data nodes, eliminating the need for a license server.
Exasol Admin is our new web-based administration interface for common administration tasks such as monitoring your database, generating and analyzing logs, creating backup schedules, updating Exasol, and managing files in BucketFS.
To learn more about the new tools and APIs, see Administration Tools (as application).
GPU support
Utilizing GPUs for parallel processing in an Exasol cluster offers a significant performance increase for certain types of workloads, specifically those that require repetitive computations. For example, GPUs can tangibly accelerate AI and machine learning workloads, including model training and model inference. GPUs can also accelerate vector and semantic search workloads.
Although GPUs are more expensive than CPUs, the performance improvements can often justify or even offset the cost, for example, compared to running a cloud based CPU workload for a long period of time.
In Exasol 2025.2 and later you can utilize GPUs to accelerate parallel processing for user defined functions (UDFs) in Exasol clusters. To learn more about how to use GPU support in UDFs, see GPU support for UDFs. To learn how to install and configure GPU support in a new Exasol deployment, see Install and configure GPU support.
A technology preview version of this feature is available in Exasol 2025.1. For more information, contact Support.
How to migrate from Exasol 7.1
Because of the differences in architecture there is no direct update path from Exasol 7.1. Instead, you have to create a fresh Exasol deployment and restore a full backup of your old Exasol 7.1 database there.
For more information about the migration procedure, see Migrate from Exasol 7.1 (AWS) and Migrate from Exasol 7.1 (as application).
