Amazon Aurora vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP are both solutions in the Relational Databases Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.6, while SAP is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 3.2% mindshare in SQL, compared to SAP’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Amazon Aurora

Read 20 Amazon Aurora reviews

1,856 Views
1,782 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Read 14 SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise reviews

1,063 Views
989 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Amazon Aurora

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise and Amazon Aurora are competing in the database management space. Amazon Aurora appears to have an advantage with its scalability and serverless architecture, catering to modern cloud applications.

Features: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise offers comprehensive security, large data handling capabilities, and efficient transaction management. Amazon Aurora provides high availability, automatic replication, and compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL, allowing for easy scalability and integration with diverse applications.

Room for Improvement: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise could enhance its cloud integration and update its features to match competitors better. Its deployment can also be more modernized. Amazon Aurora might benefit from offering more customization options, reducing complexity for first-time users, and enhancing cost transparency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Aurora provides seamless deployment through AWS with extensive documentation and agile support, enhancing operational efficiency. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise requires traditional deployment methods backed by comprehensive support services.

Pricing and ROI: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise involves a significant upfront investment, yielding strong ROI through stability in long-term use. Amazon Aurora's flexible, scalable pricing model aligns with dynamic workloads, offering cost benefits for varied demands over time.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Aurora vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

March 2026

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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

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database Management Systems (DBMS) (6th)

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Ranking in Relational Databases Tools

20th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon Aurora is 3.2%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Aurora	3.2%
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise	1.2%
Other	95.6%

Relational Databases Tools

Featured Reviews

Adnan Shafiq

Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay

High availability and geographical redundancy ensure reliable performance and cost efficiency

Amazon Aurora provides up to fifteen to sixteen read replicas. It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR. As a managed service, maintenance tasks like backup and restore are handled by AWS, saving my organization significant time and money. Additionally, its fast cloning feature allows us to create a new clone from a large database swiftly, similar to a zero-copy cloning feature in Snowflake. This makes Amazon Aurora a compelling choice for my organization.

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reviewer2784705

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that the maintainability is offloaded to the service provider, so I don't have to maintain a database or do any administrative tasks, which comes in handy."

"They now offer some really good scaling and limitless versions that are available to me, which I find very impressive."

"Aurora is the best service within AWS products for our needs."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write, and Aurora takes care of that natively, with a lot less maintenance and user input required."

"The solution’s scalability is good since we don’t need to take a maintenance window during unpredictable workloads. I like the solution’s behind-the-scenes happenings. It is a great feature."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Aurora is SQL standardization, it doesn't have its own syntax which is good. It has a lot of hands-off self-management type of activities, such as log rolling and auto-scaling."

"Amazon Aurora's best features are about scaling up and scaling down, which is perfect."

More Amazon Aurora pros

"The financials is the most valuable feature for us in operational terms because we deal with a lot of services and SAP has integrated everything for us, both financial reporting and operations."

"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."

"It's user-friendly, especially in the logistics field."

"This is a wonderful database that is, in my opinion, underrated."

"SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise is a good transactional database."

"Sufficient, robust, power DB."

"They provide easy integration with other systems."

"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."

More SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise pros

Cons

"There are tuning challenges."

"In my experience, I didn't see the claimed speed, and when you factor in the cost, or the extra cost of Aurora compared to a normal database, it didn't justify the cost from a performance standpoint, but it did justify the cost because we didn't have to have multiple instances, Redis caches, and other things like that."

"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."

"I would like to see performance insights on the database based on the queries. Currently, we use SolarWinds as the monitoring tool. I would like to leverage SolarWinds’ performance insights in AWS services. SolarWinds gives larger insights when we run performance issues."

"Sometimes mistakes can be easily made, and people can waste money by mistake if they do not know what they are doing."

"Room for improvement might be in the UI, integrations, or data working capabilities for better user experience."

"In Oracle, tools like Veridata allow for comparing databases and certifying data accuracy, even offering repair capabilities, which are missing in Aurora. There should be a similar comparison tool in Aurora."

"The pricing could improve. It should be reduced."

More Amazon Aurora cons

"SAP should refine its debugging method, and the process needs to be a little faster. It should use more Pragmas and fewer pseudocomments. I would like if SAP added more features based on advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and voice control. The modularization and if-else techniques could also incorporate the latest technology to code and solve complex problems. The SAP Editor should be more elaborative, and it should allow many more types of statements for all uses."

"The solution should improve view partitioning. The documentation is very confined and available only for users. Distributors also would like access to it."

"There is lack of good support in Mexico - I would prefer Oracle or IBM over SAP in terms of support."

"Cost-wise, SAP is still expensive compared to other available products."

"Cluster features: The Cluster Edition didn't get the same level of reliability as the Enterprise Edition did."

"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."

"Because the solution is customized. we do occasionally face unique bugs. There are always some changes that need to be made here and there."

"The overall performance of the product is an area where the tool has certain shortcomings and needs to improve."

More SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no need to buy a license for the product. We can pay as per the use case."

"The price could be lower compared to its competitors."

"It is an expensive solution."

"I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"It is quite expensive."

"The tool’s pricing depends on the instance type. For cost optimization purposes, we use the result instance category."

"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

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

University

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Construction Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	13

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

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. ...

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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...

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What is your primary use case for Amazon Aurora?

The migration process to Amazon Aurora is the best part; it's one of its key strengths, as we hardly had any hiccups during migration, which was very smooth and pretty straightforward given our dat...

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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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

YugabyteDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle Database vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 12% of the time

SQL Server vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 11% of the time

CockroachDB vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Database Cloud Service vs Amazon Aurora

Compared 9% of the time

More Amazon Aurora Competitors

SAP HANA vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 20% of the time

SAP IQ vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 17% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Netezza Performance Server vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Database In-Memory vs SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

Compared 11% of the time

More SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora

March 2026

Download Amazon Aurora product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

March 2026

Download SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise product report

Also Known As

No data available

SAP ASE

Overview

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

Visit the Amazon RDS Management Console to create your first Aurora database instance and start migrating your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is a high-performance relational database management system designed for mission-critical, data-intensive environments. It provides a centralized environment for storing and managing data, with the ability to handle a wide range of data types and a modularization technique allowing easy customization.

SAP ASE is particularly valuable for financial operations, as it offers integrated financial features. The solution also offers various control agents and the ability to match code and database index. SAP ASE has improved daily data collection and program functionality for many organizations.

SAP

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Aurora vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

March 2026

Free Report: Amazon Aurora vs. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise

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