Exasol
Ranked 4 of 5 analytical databases by recommenders
Recommended for fast analytical queries and joins, smooth scaling across many servers, and a free personal edition.
Recommended for fast analytical queries and joins, smooth scaling across many servers, and a free personal edition.
9 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 89%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 10 years
Median of the 3 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong performance on analytics and joins
“From an analytics perspective Exasol is excellent: high performance & MPP scale.”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “Databases in 2025: A Year in Review” “Exasol has been performance leader for more than 15 years in the market”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Database Benchmarks Lie (If You Let Them)” “scales much better for complex analytics workloads that joins data”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” - Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “Database Benchmarks Lie (If You Let Them)”
Scales across nodes automatically
“We have a free personal edition that can scale regarding data volumes, #servers (MPP architecture) and complex workloads.”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing” “easily handles super-wide tables, and does all the distribution across nodes for you”
Comment from 15 Jan 2026 in “Distributed SQL engine for ultra-wide tables” “the concurrency and smooth scaling to multi-node is just too seductive”
Comment from 18 Aug 2026 in “A Preview of DuckDB v2.0” Long-term satisfaction and decent support
“TPC-H benchmarks are what convinced us to purchase Exasol 10 years ago. Still happy with that decision!”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Database Benchmarks Lie (If You Let Them)” “Exasol has pretty good support.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Database Benchmarks Lie (If You Let Them)”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Needs custom virtual machine image
“it required using a custom virtual machine image”
Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “Exasol Personal – Democratizing Big Data Analytics”
Other analytical databases people recommend
The four most recommended other analytical databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DuckDB | 390 | 53 | 88% | 13 | 1 yr9 owners | Approved |
| ClickHouse | 124 | 32 | 79% | 12 | 5 yrs9 owners | Approved |
| Trino | 9 | 3 | 75% | 9 | — | — |
| ExasolThis page | 8 | 1 | 89% | 3 | 10 yrs3 owners | — |
| chDB | 6 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
13 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the concurrency and smooth scaling to multi-node is just too seductive”
“It performs well for structured analytical queries and joins”
“Exasol has pretty good support.”
“Exasol has been performance leader for more than 15 years in the market”
“TPC-H benchmarks are what convinced us to purchase Exasol 10 years ago. Still happy with that decision!”
“scales much better for complex analytics workloads that joins data”
“We have a free personal edition that can scale regarding data volumes, #servers (MPP architecture) and complex workloads.”
“This version doesn't have a hard data limit”
“This is bad news: it is not usable: > 5.3 Licensee may not disclose any benchmarking or results of evaluating the Software without Exasol´s prior written consent”
“it required using a custom virtual machine image”
“easily handles super-wide tables, and does all the distribution across nodes for you”
“From an analytics perspective Exasol is excellent: high performance & MPP scale.”
“we've had great success with Exasol, which isn't so well known in the US”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.