Oracle Database vs SAP HANA vs SQL Server comparison

Oracle Database is a top-ranking multi-model database management system by Oracle Corporation. Through Oracle database services and products, clients receive cost-optimized and high-performing versions of Oracle Database, as well as in-memory, NoSQL, and MySQL databases. The solution is available by several service providers on premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid installation. It can be run on vendor servers as well as on Oracle hardware, including Exadata on-premise, Oracle Cloud, or Cloud at Customer.

Users can select from various types of Oracle Database solutions, depending on what they aim to do with this product. Based on their specific needs, they can choose among options that include:

• Autonomously managed Oracle databases: This type of database eliminates the complexity of operating and securing Oracle Database, while simultaneously ensuring high levels of performance, scalability, and availability for users.
  
  
• Oracle Database on Exadata: Users who seek particularly fast platforms can select this type of running solution. Exadata is a computing platform that is optimized for running Oracle Databases and it serves as the fastest platform for Oracle Database.
  
  
• Oracle Database on-premises deployment: The product allows for deployment on-premises for clients who have data residency and network latency concerns. This option also offers customers the benefit of updated Oracle Cloud technology, including Exadata and Autonomous Database.
  
  
• Oracle Database in the cloud: Organizations can use a specific version of this tool in the cloud, benefiting from complete control over the versions they run and when these versions change.

Part of this product is a fully automated database service called Oracle Autonomous Database, which facilitates the development and deployment of application workloads for organizations. It is built on Oracle Database as well as on Oracle Exadata. This service supports various data types and simplifies application development and deployment from modeling and coding to extract, transform, load process (ETL), data analysis, and database optimization. The service achieves high results in:

• Performance
• Availability
• Security for online transaction processing (OLTP)
• Analytics
• Batch
• Internet of Things (IoT) workloads

Oracle Database Features

Oracle Database has various features which users can utilize in their work with the solution. Among these features are the following:

• Backup and recovery: Oracle Database ensures the integrity of users' data in system failure situations. This feature utilizes a tool named Recovery Manager (RMAN), which allows administrators to perform cold, hot, and incremental database backups, as well as point-in-time recoveries.
  
  
• Clustering: This feature enables high availability of systems in order to run without interruption of services on occasions when one or more servers in a cluster fail. Included is a tool called Oracle Real Application Clusters.
  
  
• Data dictionary: Through this set of internal tables and views, Oracle Database can be administered more efficiently.
  
  
• Logical data structure: Through its feature for logical data structure, Oracle Database stores data in a way that allows users to interact with the database without knowing where the physical storage of the data is located.
  
  
• Memory catching: Through the memory caching architecture feature, users can scale up very large databases and still perform at a considerably high speed.
  
  
• Partitioning: This feature allows users to divide large tables into different pieces and store the pieces across storage devices.

Oracle Database Benefits

Oracle Database offers its users various benefits. Some of these include:

• The solution decreases costs for organizations and provides a high return on investment (ROI) through the multiple services and features it offers.
  
  
• Oracle Database has high-security protection which includes encryption, key management, data masking, and activity monitoring, that secures organizations' data within the tool.
  
  
• The tool offers users the ability to use a single database for all data types, simplifying the process for them.
  
  
• Oracle Database can be deployed in multiple places, including data centers and public and private clouds, which allows great flexibility for users.
  
  
• The product allows applications from different platforms to communicate with the database through its networking stack.
  
  
• Oracle Database is ACID-compliant, which helps maintain data reliability and integrity.

Reviews from Real Users

Paul S., president at Advance Consulting Enterprise, likes Oracle Database because it gets the job done, doesn't fail, and suitable for massively scalable applications.

An Oracle DBA at a computer software company describes Oracle Database as reliable with good performance and very good stability.

SAP HANA, also known as SAP High-performance Analytics Appliance, is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, allowing users to avoid disk storage. The product combines its robust database with services for creating applications. SAP HANA is faster than other database management systems (DBMS) because it stores data in column-based tables in main memory and brings online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) together.

The column-oriented in-memory database design allows users to run high-speed transactions alongside advanced analytics, all in a single system. This provides companies with the ability to process very large amounts of data with low latency and query data in an instant. By combining multiple data management capabilities, the solution simplifies IT, helps businesses with innovations, and facilitates digital transformation.

The solution is structured into five groups of capabilities, categorized as:

• Database design
• Database management
• Application development
• Advanced analytics
• Data virtualization

There are three more SAP products that work alongside SAP HANA and complete the experience for users together. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a ready-to-run cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP BW/4HANA is a packaged data warehouse, based on SAP HANA, which allows users to consolidate data across the enterprise to get a consistent view of their data. Finally, SAP Cloud is a single database as a service (DBaaS) foundation for modern applications and analytics across all enterprise data. All three products can combine with SAP HANA to deliver to users an optimized experience regarding their data.

SAP HANA Features

Each architectural group of capabilities of SAP HANA has various features that users can benefit from. These include:

• Parallel processing database: SAP HANA utilizes a single platform to run transactional and analytical workloads.
  
  
• ACID compliance: This feature ensures compliance with requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards.
  
  
• Multi-tenancy: This feature allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system while sharing the same memory and processors.
  
  
• Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: SAP HANA's native storage extension is a built-in capability to manage between memory and persistent storage, including SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.
  
  
• Scaling: The scaling feature supports terabytes of data in a single server and distributes large tables across multiple servers in a cluster to scale further.
  
  
• Data modeling: This feature consists of graphical modeling tools that enable collaboration between stakeholders and the creation of models to execute complex business logic and data transformation in real time.
  
  
• Stored procedures: The product has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic.
  
  
• Administration: This feature consists of administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automations.
  
  
• Security: SAP HANA provides its users with real-time data anonymization features to extract value from data while protecting privacy.
  
  
• Availability and recovery: The tool supports high availability and disaster recovery through an array of techniques, including backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.
  
  
• Extended application services: Through its built-in application server, users can develop services such as REST and ODATA, as well as web applications that can run on multiple locations.
  
  
• Client access: The product offers clients the ability to access it via other application platforms and languages, including Java, JavaScript, R, and Go.
  
  
• Application lifecycle management: This set of features facilitates the building and packaging of applications, transporting them for development to test to production, and then deploying them.
  
  
• Application development: This feature consists of a set of tools that offer application development on premises and in the Cloud. The programming language ABAP includes additional optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.
  
  
• Search: The search feature uses SQL to locate text promptly across multiple columns and textual content.
  
  
• Spatial processing: This product feature provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions.
  
  
• Graph: Through this feature, users of the product can store and process highly connected data using a property graph.
  
  
• Streaming analytics: This feature combines various data sources that users can utilize to discover trends over a set period.
  
  
• Data integration and replication: The solution offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios.
  
  
• Data federation: This feature allows users to perform queries on remote data sources in real time with data federation.
  
  
• Caching: The capacity to cache data provides users with the ability to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data.

SAP HANA Benefits

SAP HANA provides many benefits for its users. These include:

• This solution offers a high level of data and application security, beginning from a secure setup and providing continuous support.
  
  
• SAP HANA offers augmentation for applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML).
  
  
• The solution works in a timely manner, as it provides a response to queries within seconds in large production applications.
  
  
• SAP HANA simplifies work, as it provides a single gateway to all user data with advanced data virtualization.
  
  
• The product is very flexible, as it allows users to deploy applications in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on premises, or hybrid.
  
  
• SAP HANA scales easily for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment.
  
  
• This is a powerful solution in terms of querying large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.
  
  
• SAP HANA is a versatile product that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing as well as many data types.
  
  
• The product provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication or advanced compression, and reduces data silos.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database consultant at a pharma/biotech company, SAP HANA is a very robust solution with good data access.

Bruno V., owner at LAVORO AUTOM INF E COM LTDA, likes SAP HANA because the product offers advanced features, helps reduce hours, and makes it easy to find what you need.

SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.

The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.

The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:

• SQL Server Developer
• SQL Server Expression
• SQL Server Standard 
• SQL Server Enterprise

The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.

The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:

• Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.
  
  
• Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.
  
  
• Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.
  
  
• String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.
  
  
• System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.

SQL Server Services

SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:

• Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
   
• Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.
  
  
• Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication. 
  
  
• Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.
  
  
• Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.
  
  
• Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.
  
  
• Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.
  
  
• Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.
  
  
• Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.
  
  
• Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.

SQL Server Benefits

The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:

• The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.
  
  
• Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.
  
  
• The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.
  
  
• SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
  
  
• The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.
  
  
• SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.
  
  
• The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.

Reviews from Real Users

A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature. 

Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.