Migrating from older versions
Learn about the main differences between Exasol 7.1 and the newest Exasol versions.
The new architecture introduced with Exasol 8 provides many enhancements over Exasol 7.1, including the flexibility to deploy your database on the platform of your choice, new ways to optimize performance, more integrations, and several new interfaces for system administration and monitoring.
Software and OS decoupling
Exasol no longer comes with an operating system. Instead, Exasol is provided as a Linux application that you can deploy in your own infrastructure or on cloud instances, using a Linux distribution of your choice. You can combine on-premises and cloud-based resources for optimal flexibility and scalability and to meet your performance needs.
For more details about the supported Linux distributions and other system requirements when deploying Exasol, see System Requirements.
New administration tools
Instead of EXAoperation, Exasol now provides several powerful administration interfaces that enable you to deploy and manage your databases and clusters using both built-in and external tools. These 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.
Exasol 2025.2 and later enables you to utilize GPUs to accelerate parallel processing for user defined functions (UDFs). To learn more, see GPU support for UDFs.
How to migrate from Exasol 7.1
Because of the differences in architecture there is no direct update path from Exasol 7.1. To migrate to the latest version Exasol, you must instead create a new deployment and restore a full backup of your Exasol 7.1 database there.
For more information about the migration procedure, see Migrate from Exasol 7.1.
