No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

SAP HANA vs Spark SQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

SAP HANA
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (1st), Relational Databases Tools (3rd), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (4th)
Spark SQL
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (5th)
 

Featured Reviews

Bassem Mohammed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Application Manager at TBTD
Integrated business processes have improved real-time analytics and financial performance
Whether I or my customers utilize SAP HANA's real-time analytics depends on the data needed to be displayed, and then choosing how to transfer the data to the analytic object, data source, or database to be displayed in the reports. It may be near real-time, real-time, or running batch every day. There are tools for integration between third-party systems, such as OData or APIs from SAP to get in or push data to other systems. Support for both structured and unstructured data helps organizations unify data sources depending on the needed data to be displayed. There are many ways to store it for report displays, but structured data will be better than unstructured data.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The latest version is very good, it's excellent."
"The most valuable features I have found are speed, dashboard, and reporting."
"The benefits include high database loading performance, superior reporting performance, and ease of use."
"The tool is an in-memory database that stores and retrieves data very quickly. This speed makes it faster to use and maintain data, as no additional processes move data between memory and disk."
"The solution can easily be modeled."
"Provides us with predictive capabilities for asset maintenance, and real-time forecasts."
"SAP HANA's interface is pretty user-friendly."
"The most value for us was in terms of using it to issue tenders online. We host our server, but it is open to the public, so clients who want to buy those tenders were able to go online, put their tender documents up, and we could evaluate them using SAP."
"Spark SQL's efficiency in managing distributed data and its simplicity in expressing complex operations make it an essential part of our data pipeline."
"The speed of getting data, as our TBs are big and it's a lot of data."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"Spark SQL gives us a handful of methods to design queries based on its own syntax and also incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
 

Cons

"The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"HANA could be improved by adding analytics and development models in the institution."
"One notable issue is the difficulty in finding consultants with experience in the SuccessFactors product, a human resource management tool part of SAP's cloud-based solutions. For example, learning the Oracle database is straightforward. You can easily go to the Oracle website, download the database, install it on your laptop, and access technical resources and books."
"The support is lacking and not worth the premium price. If support was just a nominal fee, it would be perceived differently."
"When we are using SAP HANA we have some difficulty with the customization. We would like to be able to add and make customized menus."
"The solution could improve by having better migration flexibility. For example, it would be helpful if there was a way for customers could check their nonproduction and production deployments."
"The surface side or Attack dashboard needs improvement because there are some gaps after sales services."
"The setup process and deployment process for SAP HANA is complex."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"In the next update, we'd like to see better performance for small points of data. It is possible but there are better tools that are faster and cheaper."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"SparkUI could have more advanced versions of the performance and the queries and all."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"There are many inconsistencies in syntax for the different querying tasks like selecting columns and joining between two tables so I'd like to see a more consistent syntax."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
"SAP HANA is more expensive than other solutions."
"Its licensing is expensive for SMEs and large enterprises alike."
"We pay $200 on a monthly basis."
"The price of licensing is dependent on the size of the project, however, we have found that there is scope to negotiate the cost. If the solution is implemented on-premises there may be some extra costs for hosting etc."
"It is expensive, which isn't a problem for us because SAP HANA is processing the data so fast."
"The price of this product is good."
"SAP HANA is expensive, but unfortunately, we do not have any alternatives."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Hadoop solutions are best for your needs.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
University
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise64
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest benefits of using SAP HANA?
Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This product is by SAP - a company that serves almost all needs a client may have co...
Is SAP HANA’s customer and technical support reliable?
We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support. So far, we have not had issues that required specialized help from technical s...
Is SAP HANA difficult to set up and start using?
SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some preparation - either you need to have experience with similar solutions, or with ot...
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Apache, Cloudera, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Hadoop. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.