Pros and cons from an experienced user

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.

We benefited from applying HANA Live and therefore replacing old reports on BI/BW. In fact, every new BI report analyzing ECC data is now developed using HANA Live. For example, a classical ABAP report took 8 hours to fill the staging table. With HANA Live we get the result almost instantaneously.

Data type support becomes more and more important. We are using ESRI GIS spatial data heavily and also recently migrated ESRI to SAP HANA in a lighthouse project. As a public service provider, it is important that spacial data is accurate and available in no time. This essentially can save lives. JSON is now the de-facto standard to exchange data with web services. It is important that a DB supports JSON natively to be able to effectively retrieve the information encoded in JSON.

Utilizing SQL script and HANA CDS views greatly reduced the need for staging tables. For data that is calculated on ABAP stack however, there is/was no option to calculate this data on the HANA layer, e.g. conversion exits for functional locations or long texts. For this, we had to make use of the SAP HANA AFL SDK (not to confuse with the PAL). Writing HANA extensions is very time consuming and can destabilize the index server. In other cases, we greatly benefit from having direct access to the ECC tables for reporting which reduces the need for a BI/BW system for data on ECC. This effectively makes ETL obsolete and is a huge cost saver plus it safeguards that the data is always accurate as it comes from one source table.