Item: SAP HANA Cloud
Rating: 10
Author: Gene Baker

Overall Satisfaction with SAP HANA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAP HANA had an extended evaluation to become our new relational database to replaced Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise. Our group reviewed it for two possible use cases. The first which was a step one in our evolution, was to use the A4A option where we migrate all of the data to HANA and use Sybase ASE as a front-end for HANA so that we don't have to recode our suite of applications. ASE would use the A4A feature (Accelerator for ASE) where ASE would push down all queries to HANA to be serviced. This would allow us to get the speed of HANA without the expense of retooling our applications to talk directly to HANA. Then step two was to identify which applications would survive long-term and migrate those to native HANA. We were interested in HANA because of the in-memory performance. During our testing we saw query speed improvements of 10,000X. Not 10,000 percent but 10,000 times faster in HANA than in ASE.

Pros and Cons

Pros

In-memory performance.
Seamless integration with Sybase ASE.
Support for ANSI SQL.
Support for History Tables.
Ability to perform on the fly what if calculations with lightning fast speed.
HANA is not just a database, it's really a platform.

Cons

I wish they would have built-in support for T-SQL since they own that parser from Sybase ASE.

Return on Investment

10,000 times performance improvement on our transactions which improves our SLAs and response times.
The multi-node solution improves our uptime and minimizes risk for a component failure.
HANA allows us to simplify our environment with one copy of the data to service all our our requests instead of 2 copies.

Alternatives Considered

MongoDB and Oracle Exadata Database Machine

HANA is basically a database platform. I think of it as going full circle back to being mainframe-like. HANA is a platform with everything you need if you chose to deploy it that way. I feel we went to distributed because of the cheap cost but needed many machines to get back to the performance of the mainframe. Now HANA takes us back that way w/o the mainframe costs. But HANA isn't cheap and I don't want to imply that. I'm sure the price may have come down since we did our extended evaluation, but we were looking at a 3-node cluster to handle our data needs. I feel that Exadata offers similar performance capabilities but in my opinion costs even more than HANA. We saw 10,000 times performance improvement on a full rack of Exadata. For HANA, we were running on a much smaller machine and saw the same 10,000 times performance improvement.

Support Rating

Super fast and very easy to use. Also SAP provided us all the support we needed to get up and running. It's an excellent product from a great team. And the A4A option makes it easy to get quickly up and running without the need for rewriting all of the applications.

Key Insights

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

Likelihood to Recommend

HANA has incredible query processing speeds. When compared with Sybase ASE for large dataset queries, we saw 10,000 times performance improvement. And for the individual point queries, we found that it was on par with Sybase ASE and that is because all of the response time is the round trip latency from the client initiating the query to the database and back. But for those large set processing requests that take a long time on Sybase, they ran 10,000 times faster on HANA. HANA is expensive so it should be used where in-memory transaction speeds are required and there are large volumes of data to be processed.

Comments

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HANA provides 10,000 times speed improvements over traditional relational database.

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