Pros and cons from an experienced user
September 26, 2019

Pros and cons from an experienced user

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

SAP HANA, enterprise edition

Overall Satisfaction with SAP HANA

We use SAP HANA for all our SAP Business Suite servers. We use HANA Live and recently the HANA AFL SDK to enhance the DB with additional features. We are happy with the HANA Live reporting features which do away with the need of ETL.
  • Data on SAP HANA is compressed by a factor of 5-7 compared to SQL DB's.
  • SAP HANA's performance is ungodly. However, it cannot heal poorly developed custom code.
  • The integration of Tensorflow and other AI frameworks help to analyze the data where it is stored.
  • Partitioning and Hot vs. cold storage capabilities help to keep the memory consumption at a reasonable scale.
  • There is a bug in HANA 2.0 SP
  • It is hard to quantify the effect of a DB with high performance. The end-users are happier as the results of their queries are displayed faster. Therefore the worker becomes more efficient which translates into less money spent.
  • We recently had severe performance problems due to a bug and out-of-memory situation. The unavailability of our digital core costs money leaving our workforce without a system.
  • We think that SAP HANA helps us to be prepared for future requirements which we simply could not solve with legacy SQL DB's.
SAP HANA is a more modern database with capabilities which reach far beyond a classical database. We chose SAP HANA as it represents the future direction of SAP which aligns with our strategic direction. With the introduction of S/4 HANA, SAP HANA will remain the only supported DB of SAP's flagship product. Hence, the move to SAP HANA is mandatory and implied when converting to SAP S/4 HANA.
The SAP HANA product support is generally very good. Although we recently had a performance issue which escalated in a system freeze. The support ticket for this issue bounced back and forth around the globe without resolving the production issue within a reasonable time. SAP addressed this by deploying an expert to analyze and resolve the issue on-site. This was greatly appreciated and made us a happy customer again.

Do you think SAP HANA Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP HANA Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP HANA Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP HANA Cloud go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP HANA Cloud again?

Yes

SAP HANA is well suited when performance is essential to the business process. HANA Live can replace the need for an external BI solution if the data comes from the ECC system (not external sources). The integration of AI frameworks, as well as the AFL, can provide a competitive advantage. Coding extension on HANA XSA is a perfect alternative for non-ABAP developers to swiftly provide solutions without the baggage that comes with the ABAP stack. For us, HANA seems less suited for unstructured data. We had to move all our GOS attachments from our legacy SQL server to a content server before we migrated to SAP HANA.