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Amazon Aurora vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Database Management Systems (DBMS) (5th)
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
19th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 2.8%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is 1.3%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon Aurora2.8%
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise1.3%
Other95.9%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
High availability and operational efficiency achieved with reliable managed services
We have primarily used Amazon Aurora for handling our databases. We migrated from PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora about a year ago. It serves as a customized PostgreSQL database that we utilize Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our…
reviewer2784705 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Advisor at a government with 10,001+ employees
Long term database experience has supported OLTP workloads and delivers reliable cross platform migrations
SAP is not putting money into modernizing SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. One of the things I discovered on the last project I was on was that they did not incorporate the Intel new instruction set in SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. Intel has augmented its instruction set referred to as new instructions. They did that to make conversion easier. When you migrate SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise cross-platform, you go through a process where it converts the character set. If you are going from AIX to Linux or from Solaris to Linux, Linux is referred to as Little Endian, while AIX or Solaris are considered Big Endian. This is determined by how the product stores data. The word size of these processors is 32 bits long. If you start numbering from the little end, it is referred to as Little Endian. If you start numbering from the big end, it is called Big Endian. To migrate a SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise database from a Big Endian setup like AIX or Solaris to migrate to a Big Endian setup on an Intel, the operating system determines whether it is Little Endian or Big Endian. When you migrate from Big Endian to Little Endian, the database has to go through a character set conversion, and some of these databases are quite large with gigabytes and gigabytes of data. They have to do a character set conversion to the existing database before they do anything else. The worst part is that you have to rebuild all the indexes when you do that. When you switch endianness of the database, you have to rebuild all the indexes. It will automatically do that for system tables, but for actual user databases, you have to rebuild all your indexes, and it takes a long time. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is a relational database and is the predecessor of Microsoft SQL Server. All that functionality that Microsoft SQL Server had came from essentially SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. The problem with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise these days is it is not expanding its place in the marketplace or expanding its position in the marketplace. A lot of companies have migrated away from SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. It works fairly well, but the problem is SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise was architected to be an OLTP engine and is now doing things for larger databases that were not in its original intended purpose. The endianness of the RDBMS is a major impediment to continuing to use SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. You have a multi-gigabyte database, and it will go through a conversion process in a single-threaded fashion, and then you have to rebuild the indexes. Rebuilding the indexes is lengthy and time-consuming. The part of the conversion process that is concerned with conversion of the character set is single-threaded. You may have eight cores on your machine or virtual machine and only one can be used in the conversion process. There is another problem with the whole thing in that it will sometimes not operate properly. Under certain workloads, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise will become overwhelmed. When you convert it, it does not operate properly in all circumstances. The root cause of that is that SAP in its desire to save money and desire to orphan the product has not recompiled or redeveloped the product to take advantage of the Intel new instruction set. Other relational databases such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server have the same issue to deal with, but with those platforms, they are taking advantage of the new instruction set. There are some additional Intel instruction sets or instructions in their Intel instruction set. With SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, they did not bother to incorporate support for the new instruction set instructions. In certain circumstances, the database does not operate properly. It is unable to do what it needs to do. If you do your research and go on the internet and see what happens with Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, what comes back is that it takes 4% longer to perform a lot of the instructions. When you are using the new instruction set, it adds 4% to the runtime of the database.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Amazon Aurora is built on community databases and AWS has added additional features to it, allowing customers to have enterprise-level features at a lower cost."
"The provision of custom read and write endpoints eliminates the need for managing a separate proxy load balancer."
"Aurora is a key pillar for us, offering performance and availability."
"They now offer some really good scaling and limitless versions that are available to me, which I find very impressive."
"We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities."
"One of the standout features of Amazon Aurora is that we do not need to maintain disaster recovery or manage availability zones."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write. These are the kinds of features that we were interested in, and Aurora takes care of that natively."
"Amazon Aurora stands out for its ease of use in a managed environment, inbuilt security, continuous backups, numerous read replicas, multi-region automated replication, and seamless integration with other AWS services."
"I like that SAP ASE can match code and the database index to index data in the programming language. There are many other valuable features, such as the table buffer, tuning, and various control agents like dispatcher. SAP ASE can handle many different data types, including views, domains, data elements, structures, objects, and various table types that are most useful in the application. Its modularization technique is also handy."
"They provide easy integration with other systems."
"It's user-friendly, especially in the logistics field."
"The most valuable part of the tool stems from the fact that it is a very cost-efficient product compared to the newer technologies because it needs a very small amount of RAM."
"The actual interface is good."
"This is a wonderful database that is, in my opinion, underrated. Users are able to get the most out of my experience by taking advantage of its centralized environment."
"SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise was basically as good as its rivals in my experience."
"In SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, there are some built-in stored procedures that you can use to fire those commands and get the data in a very systematic manner where you can see the results."
 

Cons

"It is a bit costly. The features are quite good, and I wouldn't say it requires any technical improvements. But from a cost perspective, some clients wouldn't go for Aurora because of that."
"Amazon Aurora should upgrade its base PostgreSQL versions more frequently and offer all PostgreSQL extensions."
"There are tuning challenges."
"I would like to see more AI-related features in future releases."
"A challenge I noticed is during migration from PostgreSQL RDS to Amazon Aurora. There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly."
"The product's distributed query process for MySQL needs improvement."
"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."
"While Amazon Aurora meets your current scaling and storage needs, there is room for improvement in cryptography and scalability compared to other databases."
"The solution should improve view partitioning. The documentation is very confined and available only for users. Distributors also would like access to it."
"When we acquire a new project that is sometimes related to data migrations, after getting those data, there are lots of deadlocks happening."
"They turned a functional product into something where you have to go through a difficult process to do the conversion."
"In my opinion, product support is not that great from SAP because they have already declared the end-of-date for SAP ASE. They will be stopping product support."
"I think that the solution needs to be positioned better within the market as it appears as though the Adaptive Server is being left out of the SAP scope."
"There could be some improvements in barcode scanning and RFID access."
"User interface could be more user friendly."
"The overall performance of the product is an area where the tool has certain shortcomings and needs to improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."
"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."
"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."
"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"It is quite expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The licensing cost for ASE is pretty low."
"Price-wise, the product is worth it since one needs very less infrastructure to use it."
"I rate SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise's pricing a six out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
6%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Aurora?
Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper. However, when you manage the administration more closely, you can control costs better with Amazon Aurora. ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
I would like to see some tutorials from Amazon for Aurora because I'm too new to it. I believe Amazon can make more tutorials for the product since there's a lot of reading required, and a short tu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?
From a pricing perspective, I would say the solution is fairly priced. In Oracle, you have two or three databases at most on one machine. In SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, one machine can have mul...
What needs improvement with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?
SAP is not putting money into modernizing SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. One of the things I discovered on the last project I was on was that they did not incorporate the Intel new instruction set...
What is your primary use case for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?
I have worked with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise IQ, and Replication Server. I also worked with SQL Anywhere at one point. SAP acquired Sybase at one point, and the...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP ASE
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
City of Buenos Aires, ASR Group, Citrix, EarlySense, Usha International Limited, Automotive Resources International (ARI), Takisada-Osaka Co. Ltd., Coelba (Grupo Neoenergia), RZD Russian Railways, National Basketball Association - NBA, TALLY
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Aurora vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.