Oracle Exadata, Exalytics, and Exalogic belong to Oracle's Exa family of products. Exadata is Oracle's high performance Engineered Database Platform that is designed for resource intensive queries. In general, it is expected to significantly improve query performance over non-Exadata systems, and supports advanced software features such as in-memory computing, independent row and column-based filtering, and other hardware features such as support for the latest storage devices, including NVMe, in-memory fault tolerance, and others.

Exalytics is a complementary solution that is intended primarily for BI workloads. The Exa family of products are considered engineered systems as opposed to appliances. Whereas the latter may indicate preset and pre-loaded software-hardware stacks, an engineered system is expected to support a higher level of flexibility regarding the choice of installed components which are installed selectively depending on client needs. One of the key components of Exalytics commonly found in enterprise installations is OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition). This is a complete BI suite and benefits from an underlying in-memory database called Times Ten, which is also a part of the Exalytics ecosystem.

Business use case: Oracle Exadata is used for OLTP transactional workloads where speed and performance is critical.

Exalytics, on the other hand, is used for analytical workloads. The integrated OBIEE interface together with TimesTen provides a strongly coupled analytics environment. Oracle Exadata is also available as a cloud-based service.