SAP HANA Reviews

Primarily, we used it for reporting and as the underlying database platform for SAP BW solutions.

My experience with SAP NetWeaver is primarily at the database level with SAP HANA. The database is still under development even after its official release over ten years ago. We often see new products with each major release, and there are still a lot of bugs.

As an in-memory database, expectations for HANA were already high, especially considering the infrastructure investments. 

We've seen reporting performance increase four to five times, which was a substantial improvement. At the end of the day, you expect those improvements when spending significant amounts on a solution.

It's a relatively new technology, and in-memory databases intrinsically require larger servers with more memory. We purchase the HANA license from SAP and the hardware from a vendor like HP or IBM.

Ultimately, as an organization, we aimed to speed up support and enable our executives to generate reports on their screens almost instantly with the click of a button. From that perspective, HANA delivered as a reporting solution.

SAP HANA's in-memory computing improved our operational efficiency. In terms of our overall business operations, I'd estimate a 30-40% improvement. Considering things like ticketing, resource allocation, and issue resolution, it's definitely had a sizable impact.

Its performance is one big benefit. 

Reporting is also valuable, but that's standard. I also like SAP HANA's ability to integrate with third-party tools. We can do reporting with tools like Tableau or Power BI by integrating them with HANA for visualization.

It's sufficed all of our requirements. We primarily needed it to run SAP applications, like NetWeaver or S/4HANA, and it has been really good at that. We also successfully integrated it with Tableau for reporting. Overall, it sufficed our needs.

The releases need to be more stable. It's surprising to still encounter significant bugs after ten years of the product being available.

In terms of features, SAP seems to be keeping up with its competitors like Oracle. The main issue is that the features they add often have a lot of bugs.

I've been working with it for ten years. I was a customer of HANA for ten years and have since moved on to new technologies.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. It should be improved. It's not that the system goes down, but there are irritations that affect users.

It's a highly scalable solution. No concerns there. It supports our growing data needs.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

We have database-based users and business users. Overall, it would be more than five thousand at my last organization, we had many employees dependent on SAP. However, we were looking to onboard a few more of our business units to SAP. So, we were targeting an increase in usage by 20% to 30%.

There is room for improvement in the following areas:

1. The response times
2. The prioritization framework for customers
3. Reaching the correct expert quickly

So, those areas should be noted for improvement in customer service and support. 

Neutral

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with ten being easy. 

Because with HANA, it's less about setting up a new system and more about migrating your old system to HANA. The migration experience isn't the same for everyone or for all customers; you can't follow a single runbook. 

You often need external consultants, SAP premium subscriptions, and SAP experts to manage the migration, and sometimes you need external code. So, from that perspective, it's a six.

I have used SAP HANA on the public cloud and on-premise.

There are two ways to think about the deployment stage:

1. For a Greenfield implementation of HANA, you are building a system from the ground up with SAP, which might take as little as a week. 
2. For large-scale brownfield implementations, where you're migrating your existing database to SAP HANA, it can take anywhere from five to six months to one year.

The price is on the expensive side, at eight out of ten, with ten being expensive. 

We were premium customers with our HANA boxes. It was part of an enterprise license that wasn’t tied to the number of HANA instances we had. 

I would recommend ensuring you have the proper SAP experts on your team if you plan to go for SAP HANA. 

If you don't have SAP experts, it's better to opt for SAP cloud solutions, which are managed by SAP.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for modeling and data extraction.

The solution can easily be modeled.

The openness of the system could be more developed.

The solution should go into the cloud. The cloud mechanism should be more invested.

I have been using SAP HANA for 11 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. Approximately 200 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The customer support team is good because of vendor and priority.

I have used AWS before. Both SAP HANA and AWS are the same product.

The initial setup is simple.

The tool has a high price. I rate the solution’s pricing, one on a scale of ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap.

SAP HANA is in the market, but there are other competitors available.

I recommend the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven-point five out of ten.

We use HANA mostly for any live reporting directly from the ECC box or S/4HANA box. We also do some of the operational reports, where it is difficult to do or apply the logic directly in the ECC box. It's better to bring the data, do your logic in SAP HANA and do your reporting out of it. Or you can also push your data to BW as well, by doing all your logic, and you can also expose your HANA calculation directly to SAP Analytics Cloud as well as Power BI.

The maintenance is quick. It's analytics directly out of the box. You do not need storage. You bring the data, do your calculation, and do your reporting. That said, if you want to store it, there's a cost involved. However, if you just want to report out of it, you don't have to move your data to any other place. I won't call it a data warehouse; it's more about quick analytic reporting out of SAP.

The speed at which it gets the data is great. There's a quick response time and quick reporting.

Most of what we need is already there. 

The initial setup isn't too difficult. 

It's a scalable product. 

It's still improving there, still improving a lot. Most of the extractors that are now. Most of the standard things don't satisfy the requirements in order to go for the custom build. More standards would help in the future.

I've been using the solution for five years. 

There are always stability issues. However, that is why we have SAP. I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale. I'd rate it nine out of ten in terms of the ability to expand. Of course, it comes down to cot. While it can scale, it will cost to do so. We have six users dealing with the product right now. Everyone in the organization is on HANA, whether it S4 or BW.

While I haven't dealt with support in the past year, they are usually pretty good.

Positive

You do need resources specifically dedicated to the solution. However, it's not that complex. I'd rate the ease of setup around six to seven out of ten.

It is pretty quick to deploy. Deployments happen weekly or biweekly. 

One resource is enough to handle deployment, and three for maintenance.

We have witnessed a very good ROI since you don't have to install a separate box. 

The main concern of every customer is the cost of the product. However, the pro is maintenance. You do not have to do a lot of maintenance on it. The number of results that you need after go-live would be less compared to any other data warehousing tool. You don't need a bunch of data engineers or data scientists, you just need a couple of business resources and a couple of analysts. In that sense, it costs less.

We're working with the latest version of the solution. 

I really like SAP. It's the best ERP tool. If you want to implement analytics, go with HANA. Go with SAP Data Warehousing if you want to implement a data warehouse.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We have a full landscape for SAP. Currently, my customer is using it. We are using the native HANA for the non-SAP sources.

We have our data nodes for different business domains. The data is coming from non-SAP sources. The data is coming from different systems. We have a database warehouse approach.

The solution is very fast in terms of memory. It's very convenient and very innovative. It's very good at handling the input and output of the data. There is no lag.

It has become the base of building graphical calculation views. 

It is very convenient when you are working with Postgres or Snowflake. When you have modeled everything correctly, it's easy to translate the model. 

With the way native works, it builds a good platform. It's not just a database. It's much more.

It has an inbuilt smart data integrator which you can use for sourcing, researching, and loading the data. It's included in the web IDE version of the web HANA deployment. 

This is a very mature product. The performance is very good. 

I cannot think of any features that are missing at this time. 

In the calculation views, the functions that have been provided to build the graphical views should be enhanced and could be made more flexible. There should be more functionality available.

You cannot apply mulit-join inside the calculation views, for example, when you are joining tables. You have to do it in a four-node. You have to join them one by one instead of joining everything together in one step. 

I've been using the solution for six years. 

The performance is good. It is mature and stable. I've never experienced any issues like crashing or freezing.

The scalability is very good. I'd rate it 8.5 out of ten in terms of ease of scaling. 

This is a good solution for enterprise solutions. 

In terms of the initial setup, I do not know how to install it on the server itself. I don't handle the technical aspects since I am a consultant. I don't directly handle the setup process. Likely, it is installed on Linux.

While my understanding is the product is likely expensive I do not handle the pricing. I don't know the exact costs. 

Smaller companies may not be suitable as the pricing is quite expensive. Even medium-level companies would have trouble affording a full SAP stack. An enterprise would have the budget to take this solution on.

The cloud may be more affordable, however, on-prem would be very expensive. 

I'm a consultant. 

In terms of relational databases, this is the best option.

If you are going to work with HANA, make sure to use the latest version. It has the latest approaches.

Users should utilize the HANA platform to the fullest extent. Get the most out of it by using all of the tools, as much as possible. Don't just use it as a data model database.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We primarily use SAP HANA for ERP in the manufacturing and delivery industries.

What I like best about SAP HANA is that it's faster than Microsoft SQL Server.

The SAP HANA interface has room for improvement because it takes more work to manage than the Microsoft SQL Server interface.

Nowadays, you'll see more no-code tools in the market with a drag-and-drop feature, and that's what I want to see in SAP HANA in the future.

I've been using SAP HANA for six months.

SAP HANA is a stable product. Its stability is eight out of ten.

The scalability of SAP HANA is a six out of ten.

My company used to work with Oracle Database version 10.2, but migrated to Microsoft SQL Server and now also using SAP HANA because Oracle Database is expensive, plus it requires users with a higher level of experience on Oracle Database.

The initial setup for SAP HANA is so-so. It's not easy, yet it's not so difficult. I'm rating its setup as six out of ten.

The total time it takes to deploy SAP HANA depends on the type of integration. I have a lot of integrations where one integration gets deployed within thirty minutes, while another takes more than two days to deploy.

The pricing for SAP HANA is high. It was expensive. You have to pay a lot, and it's the highest-priced solution in the local market, though when you compare it to other tools in the global market, the price is similar.

You pay a lot for the license, and you also have to pay for some add-ons.

I'd rate SAP HANA licensing fees as two out of ten.

My company uses SAP HANA.

My company has SAP Business One version 9.3 that integrates with SAP HANA, but I haven't worked much on SAP HANA yet.

I'm a user of SAP HANA, not a partner.

Around thirty people, mostly technicians, work on deploying SAP HANA. The solution requires five to six engineers for maintenance.

My company has eighty-eight SAP HANA licenses used mainly by the end-users, for example, managers.

I'd tell anyone looking into using SAP HANA that it's a good tool but expensive for smaller-scale companies.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate SAP HANA as ten because it's a good tool, and I like its technology.

We use it in order-placing and in the IBD integration, integrated business planning for forecast, and demand planning. I'm working in the sales and operation department. I'm not working in finance or production. Maybe the other teams are using it differently, or they're using different modules, however, for us at sales and operation, we are using it to place orders, developer CAST, track reports, and ensure accuracy.

It's made everything faster. The best thing we have is a faster operation. Even the reports are being generated very fast versus before. Before, we used to have an older version of SAP, and once we migrated or upgraded the old system to the current system, the speed of the work totally changed.

The integration is quite good. It's like an add-on in which we add the tools we need, like Excel. 

We're not using the interface with SAP HANA itself. However, we're using a remote access link which we access via the web, and we are also using an add-on, which is installed in our Microsoft Excel program. Therefore, we are not particularly using the SAP HANA environment. We don't have this desktop interface in front of us. As far as I know, this is the engine behind all our work.

The setup is easy.

When we upgraded, we received more functions or more features. I am not aware of all of them; however, I've received positive feedback from the users in our company.

It's a stable product.

The solution scales well. 

The pricing could be better. Finding the solution or adding some additional features that are customized for what we need is difficult. It costs a lot of money. For example, our office has SAP HANA, and the Saudi distributor has SAP, or at least, another version. We are trying now to integrate the two systems together. However, the cost is too much. We'd like to see more integration capabilities.

It does take a while to set up.

I've been using the solution for a year and a half. 

The solution is reliable and quite stable. The performance is good. There are no bogs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It can scale. 

We have about 2,500 employees. Not everyone is using it. Some are in the factory, and some are in the office. Some are at specific branches. We are an international multinational company, our head office is in Italy, and we have branches worldwide.

We haven't had any critical issues. However, we have received good support overall. We haven't really dealt with any downtime. It's very rare. It might have only happened once. 

Positive

Currently, we are doing some integration between SAP and some other tools like Power BI and Tableau. We have some customized solutions developed in-house. We used to use an older version of SAP and upgraded it. 

When I worked at a different company, I used to work with Dynamic Business Solutions, not SAP HANA.

It was an easy setup. That said, the implementation takes some time. They spent two or three months just developing the requirements and they gathered from us what we need to do. Then they implement it in two or three months. I don't know if this is a long period or a short period, however, that is how long it took for us. 

I'm not sure how deployment and maintenance are handled. I'm not sure how many people are involved in those aspects of the product. 

We invited a third party to do the implementation. 

Our team did the wishlist, the comments, and we shared it with a third party, and this third party came on-site, and they finished the job.

I'm not sure of the exact numbers surrounding ROI. They may have done a study and chosen the solution based on ROI. However, I was not a part of that process. 

We are spending about 20,000 to 30,000 euros on the solution. It is a one-time implementation. To integrate everything and do the gap analysis, and then implement all of that as per our requirements, that cost us too much money.

We're a potential SAP partner. 

We are using SAP HANA in Italy. We're using the latest version there. That said, in Saudi Arabia, we are not using SAP HANA. They're using the older version.

We have remote access. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. SAP is a very powerful tool.

I would rate it nine 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.

The most valuable feature of SAP HANA is its performance and integration.

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.

Integrating SAP HANA with BTP HANA is difficult and there should be guides available.

I have been using SAP HANA for approximately seven years.

The solution is highly reliable.

I rate the stability of SAP HANA a nine out of ten.

We have more than 100 people using the solution.

I rate the scalability of SAP HANA a ten out of ten.

I have had good responses from the support.

I rate the support from SAP HANA a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have used MongoDB and SQL.

The initial setup of SAP HANA was simple. The process can take approximately 45 minutes.

The licensing could improve.

One person can manage the maintenance of the solution.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate SAP HANA a ten out of ten.