# Exasol

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/exasol/

6 people recommended Exasol in Hacker News comments, 1 had mixed feelings and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 12 months, in 7 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for fast analytical queries and joins, smooth scaling across many servers, and a free personal edition.

Summary written by Claude from 13 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong performance on analytics and joins (4 comments in the sample): "From an analytics perspective Exasol is excellent: high performance & MPP scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550728)) "Exasol has been performance leader for more than 15 years in the market" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46822321)) "scales much better for complex analytics workloads that joins data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677299))
- Scales across nodes automatically (3 comments in the sample): "We have a free personal edition that can scale regarding data volumes, #servers (MPP architecture) and complex workloads." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677247)) "easily handles super-wide tables, and does all the distribution across nodes for you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629131)) "the concurrency and smooth scaling to multi-node is just too seductive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341594))
- Long-term satisfaction and decent support (2 comments in the sample): "TPC-H benchmarks are what convinced us to purchase Exasol 10 years ago. Still happy with that decision!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783252)) "Exasol has pretty good support." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46824907))

## What people warn about

- Needs custom virtual machine image (1 comment in the sample): "it required using a custom virtual machine image" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648570))

## Other analytical databases people recommend

- [DuckDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/duckdb/): 321 recommend, 39 mixed, 44 criticize
- [ClickHouse](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clickhouse/): 93 recommend, 20 mixed, 28 criticize
- [chDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chdb/): 5 recommend, 1 mixed, 0 criticize
- [Trino](https://hackerapproved.com/p/trino/): 5 recommend, 4 mixed, 3 criticize

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.exasol.com/)

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Exasol", https://hackerapproved.com/p/exasol/ (6 recommend, 1 mixed, 1 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.