SAP HANA Reviews

We use it for database virtualization.

The main feature is that the processes are very flexible, they are able to be adapted to the business and their departments. The solution is very good and has covered all functional areas needed in this type of solution.

There could be better management for faster updates, last year there were some changes in India to the e-invoicing feature. During that time, there was a couple of updates that we had to wait until the release happened before we could do the implementation, this was a time we had to wait. They are pretty good at releasing updates but that time it was not the fastest.

I have been using the solution for a few months.

I have found the solution to be stable, it is very robust.

There is the ability to scale the solution by increasing capacity with no problem, it is very flexible. We have almost 34,000 users using the solution.

We had some issue with support in the past because they did not have enough availability. However, they have improved and now they are okay. 

Since we have been using the solution before we did not have any issues with the install. There were not any major complex operations. However, there were some challenges but we had the full documentation with us and it was not a problem. 

The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive. If they wanted to go into other industries and sectors the cost is on the higher side. They cannot go into each and every sector. If the cost was more reasonable, then it would be easy for them to enter more markets. This would be a disruptor in the industry because it would be used more often than other solutions, which would be good for the company.

I do recommend this solution but at the same time, it is expensive. The cost will not be able to be afforded by everyone such as medium and small scale businesses.

I rate SAP HANA an eight out of ten.

I am currently using the latest version. But before that, before I jumped into the version, I used the initial version of HANA, as well. This initial version of HANA was not that great, it had a lot of bugs. But the latest version is very good. It's excellent.

I'm afraid that HANA is not a relational database, it's a column-level database just like Sybase IQ. Sybase is also an activity product, an SAP product. SAP bought Sybase in May 2010. So normal Sybase is RDBMS. Sybase has one more variant called Sybase IQ. That is not RDBMS, that is a column-level database. Normal Sybase is a whole-level database. That's a column-level database. So SAP HANA is based on this column-level architecture.

One more thing. The success of HANA primarily depends on the RAM and the storage. HANA became a success because the cost of the solar devices has fallen down substantially. I don't know about British Pounds, but in Indian Rupees, earlier in 2007, 2008, when I was working for Microsoft, one terabyte of a SAN device, used to cost around 22.5 LAK. I would say I would have had a 100,000. I think that's the nature. So one SAN device was costing 22 LAKs. The same SAN device, in 2013 and 2014, was costing around three LAKs. So the SAN device cost reduced by more than 200%.

Also, in parallel, the RAM cost also decreased, and the technology and the fastness of RAM increased. This impacted the primary condition for RDB and RDBMSs like Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, and the like, that they need to support the foreign key relationship, where I have a few tables. For example, if I have five to six tables, suppose the first table is employment information. The second table is employee career details or his project, something like that.

Now, instead of populating the tables with the same information, the primary condition of RDBMS was to have a foreign key relationship between these two tables and reduce the redundancy. That was a primary condition, but in HANA, thanks to the cheap storage and high-speed RAM, I may not even bother to do a redundancy of data. I can combine all the tables and make a huge table. And as an entire table, whatever its size, I can pin the table in the RAM so that my access of information is not from the hard disk, but is directly from the memory, which is much, much, much faster. That is the beauty of HANA.

I'm still researching the features of HANA. In terms of memory, data access and data pitching, HANA has scored a victory, no doubt about that. But when I compare the non HANA architecture with SAP, ERP, the SAP ERP comes in two levels. SAP ECC, which is a non HANA based product, and SAP S/4HANA, which is a HANA-based product. If I compare these two, there are almost around 5,000 to 6,000 tables, which were merged together in HANA,  making it a robust architecture.

In earlier SAP we used to have fragmented, small-scale architecture. HANA is a robust architecture where one table itself is a behemoth quantity of many, many columns and a lot of redundant data. So my interest in HANA would be how SAP is catering to the demand of reducing the redundancy of data, and at the same time pinning the entire critical tables into the memory so that access to the data is faster. I am researching those factors.

I have roughly five years of experience in SAP HANA, because I started working on SAP ECC, on logistics and other components. After that, HANA became famous only in the years 2013 and 2014. Then I started pursuing HANA very, very actively. Right now, my journey is continuing and after five to six years I have a good amount of knowledge and experience on HANA.

It is stable.

SAP HANA is vertically and horizontally scalable.

Our banking system uses HANA primarily for our financial transactions. There are our SAP financials running on HANA. This HANA SAP was on the Oracle database. We have migrated it. It's very, very complex and took almost one year for us to prepare the plan and migrate to HANA finance. There are around 700 to 800 users using the database and they're not facing any problem. It's fantastic.

I would say I'm satisfied with technical support, buy it can be improved also. Improved in  terms of data warehousing, because HANA was introduced for data warehousing and because SAP wanted to catch the OLTP market. Now they have introduced many things to attract the OLTP customers, especially in banking and telecom sectors. That's okay. You have to keep your business interests also. HANA's architecture is the foundation of the language of data, warehousing, and design. For any project or product, if it's based on data warehousing, I would say HANA is the language for that because what data warehousing wants is a data warehousing database.

Primarily, it's not an OLDP, it's OLAP, online analytics processing. And where the data is not changed, the data doesn't change as frequently as a OLTB database. For that kind of environment, I think HANA needs a lot of improvement in terms of making it more columnar. It has to incorporate up level design a little bit harder, as well. 

You know MySQL database? Not Microsoft, MySQL. Microsoft is not SQL. M-Y-S-Q-L, has been bought by Oracle. Oracle bought MySQL, it acquired the MySQL company. If you look into the database, by default, MySQL engine is InnoDB. InnoDB is the default engine on MySQL. But, MySQL also gives you the flexibility of choosing your own engine. I don't want to know InnoDB, I have a huge Microsoft Excel file with around 10,000 rows, but I don't want to use InnoDB because I have to pay for that. To save those costs, at the time of starting MySQL engine, I can choose my type of data. Instead of InnoDB, I can choose Excel also. SAP HANA should give that kind of flexibility to its customers, making it more reachable to small SMEs, small and medium enterprises.

Now it is simple, because thanks to the cloud approach, it is giving a lot of flexibility to the customer, but if it wants to attack, hit the right target, acquiring the very, very small scale customer, who has around max 50 terabytes data or 100 terabyte data, a small scale company, small companies, that market should also be captured by SAP, not only the big companies. As the English saying goes, small things count. You can't ignore small things.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The only thing was there were a lot of parameters which had to be taken into consideration and any parameter at installation will be paid. But one good thing about SAP HANA is even if you miss a single parameter, you cannot agree to it for the steps. The further steps will tell you that, "you have missed this step. You first complete it, then you can come here." That kind of interlinking is there. So yes, SAP installation is pretty straightforward, and very easy and smooth.

I would recommend SAP HANA. No doubt I would definitely recommend it. But the thing is, if I adopt SAP HANA, my total cost of ownership in terms of having a functional consultant, as well as a HANA admin, would increase. I should first find a balance and analyze the data, "Do I really want to have HANA? What benefit will I have if I have HANA at my premises? And if I want to cut cost but also get the benefits of HANA, will the cloud option of HANA cater to my needs?" All those questions.

That is the company analysis I should do: what do they do differently? But many companies will be driven by the business needs, but at the same time some companies will also be driven by factors like the existing relationship with other vendors, like Oracle or SQL Server, and the kind of discounts they get when they buy that product. All those things will be there as driving factors. To answer your question, I would definitely recommend SAP HANA to anyone.

High availability and disaster recovery are very poor in HANA. High availability is measured on the barometer of RPO and RTO. RPO stands for recovery point objective, RTO stands for recovery time objective. The graph in which these two factors will be measured is from the five nines, the seven nines, or the three nines, that kind of factor. But it is a factor of my high availability. 99.9% of my database is available or 99.99999999%, giving a chance of 0.0001% for some kind of availability failure is because of natural disaster or some kind of electrical failures or something like that. So those are the factors you have to see for high availability.

My SAP HANA, technically, can withstand those calamities and recover itself from that disaster. That is called high availability. That high availability is there, but it is very, very, very minimal. If you're talking about high availability of HANA in actual high availability markets compared to Oracle and other RDBMS, HANA is a small child. If you remember when Microsoft SQL Server came into the RDBS market back in the year 1997, when they introduced the SQL 97, then they introduced the SQL 2000, SQL 2005. At that time, they introduced the high availability called Windows Cluster log shipping, mirroring the application.

At that time, in 2007 and 2008, Oracle introduced RAC, Real Application Clusters. Compared to the features of real application clusters, the Microsoft product was a small child. And Microsoft took that as a challenge and they improved and they improved. And in 2012 they introduced something called Always On. Always On is an improved version of high availability in SQL Server. HANA has to do that kind of stuff. HANA's high availability is immature.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP HANA an eight.

We primarily use SAP HANA for machine learning and deep learning.

The solution is very stable.

The solution can scale well.

We've had good experiences with technical support.

The performance is excellent.

We use SAP HANA in our projects but it's very expensive for our projects. We need a relational database in-memory that can handle these issues.

The solution is very expensive for us.

It's hard for us to find test users and sometimes we need them to connect to SAP from Iran, however, this is an issue due to the sanctions against the country.

We've been using the solution for more than six years.

We've found the solution to be very, very stable, especially when you compare it to other solutions.

The solution can scale quite well. If a company needs to expand it so that it fits their growing needs, they can do so easily. 

The technical support on offer is very good. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

We tried GQ database but it's not a stable database. Sometimes the results weren't correct. SAP HANA is much more stable, which is why we use it, even though it's expensive. 

The solution is very pricey. We're looking into other options because of this.

We're looking at Oracle products as an option right now. We're also looking at MAT-V, a CPU-based database it's very fast, however, we do occasionally face issues with it.

We are a customer. We don't have a professional relationship with SAP.

SAP HANA is not just a memory database, it's a big platform. It's a very, very safe database. It's a very safe database and the performance is very, very good for an in-memory database. For example, sometimes we use Oracle databases 18C or 19C. The data is in the memory, however, when data is running, it's very slow, due to the fact that all data is in the memory and you need to and go to write disk. 

Sometimes when the data is very large, we might scale up our approach, and, in the scale-up approach, sometimes it is slow in HANA. That said, the scale-up approach is very, very good. SAP has got one problem. When you start the database, all data from the tool's memory takes a very long time. We've found that IBM's non-volatile memory is better than internal memory.  New users just need to be aware of that.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The solution, overall, has fantastic performance, however, the cost makes it really hard for us to keep using it.

The memory capabilities are great.

The performance is very, very good. It's one of the best aspects of the solution.

I've used Oracle for ten years, and yet, I find SAP better than Oracle. Oracle is more cost-based.

Oracle tends to have better features than SAP HANA. They should work to add the kinds of features clients expect from Oracle.

With Oracle, you can install their cloud and that enables you to see more of the database and multiple accounts. This is better than what SAP has on offer.

SAP could really work on its monitoring capabilities.

There's data aging that needs to be dealt with on the solution. It's not ideal. You might have a lot of raw data and aging can really affect it.

It would be help if the solution had a graph database. They're lacking that right now.

There's an issue in the partition. When you record more than two million records, partitioning does not work well. In Oracle it's easy. SAP must resolve this issue in order to be more competitive with Oracle.

I've been using the solution for about five years at this point. It's been about half a decade.

The scalability of the solution is pretty good. We don't have any problems in that area.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. It wasn't that good. Sometimes the information we received from them wasn't accurate. It's a difficult solution. I would say, to be fair, that their support is better than Oracle's.

In the case of Oracle, I had an issue once with Oracle GoldenGate. It took two weeks to resolve the issue. That's far too long. SAP is much more responsive. It's never taken two weeks to resolve anything.

We also used Oracle. We find SAP to be very fast. It's much faster than Oracle.

The initial setup was five years ago, so it's been a while. However, I do recall it being straightforward. We typically install a version on Linux. While it can be difficult, at the moment, it's pretty good. Things have changed a bit, and they've improved the setup a bit. It's not really that unsimilar to Microsoft's SQL server.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with SAP.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

We use an on-premises version and e have a private cloud in our company.

I'd recommend the solution. If you have, for example, a huge project that's kind of a unique, scalable database I recommend SAP HANA for it. It's easy to use and handles more RAM.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use SAP HANA for Master Data Governance.

The solution needs to work on its performance and make it faster.

I have been working with the solution for four years.

I am satisfied with the tool’s stability.

I would rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. Our company has four users for the solution.

The solution’s tech support is good.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. The deployment took around six months to complete.

The tool’s subscription is yearly.

I would rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. You can use the solution if it meets your requirements.

The solution is mainly for in-memory computing and past data processing, both columns or databases. It's a very good database.

The solution offers very good in-memory computing.

We can save data very easily.

It is easy to set up. The implementation process is quite straightforward for us. 

The solution is stable.

There are limitations on tables. There is a two billion record limitation on a table. We'd like it if there could be more. If a table passes two billion records, SAP goes down.

The pricing is expensive. 

I've dealt with the solution since 2012. It's been about ten years or so. We've used it for around a decade now. 

It's very stable. We've been using it for almost ten years and haven't had any issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

It's quite a costly product. It is expensive. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of the level of expense. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It's one of the best databases in the world. 

We use this solution in conjunction with other prompted solutions primarily for real-time analytics.

The pricing on this product could be reduced, and the installation process could be more straightforward.

We have been using the solution as integrators for about five years.

The solution is stable.

I do not have any experience with customer service and support.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It took us between seven and 15 days for deployment. We have over ten people using this solution in our organization.

I am not sure about the licensing costs for this solution, but the feedback I have received is that it is expensive.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. It is a good product, but it is expensive.

I have customers who work with SAP, and I carried out performance research for them, comparing the different parameters of SAP HANA. The solution is generally used for data warehousing. 

I think the in-memory database is excellent as it boosts performance. 

The product lacks some flexibility in its settings and configurations.

The solution is stable. 

The product is quite scalable.

I don't think the initial setup is too complex. Obviously it's not easy because SAP HANA is a complex system, so it's somewhere in the middle.

Licensing costs are quite expensive for the Ukraine but there is a range of different purchasing models so it's flexible in that sense. For a small enterprise, the costs might seem unreasonably high.

I rate this solution eight out of 10.