SAP HANA vs SQL Server vs Teradata comparison

SAP HANA, also known as SAP High-performance Analytics Appliance, is a multi-model database that stores data in its memory, allowing users to avoid disk storage. The product combines its robust database with services for creating applications. SAP HANA is faster than other database management systems (DBMS) because it stores data in column-based tables in main memory and brings online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) together.

The column-oriented in-memory database design allows users to run high-speed transactions alongside advanced analytics, all in a single system. This provides companies with the ability to process very large amounts of data with low latency and query data in an instant. By combining multiple data management capabilities, the solution simplifies IT, helps businesses with innovations, and facilitates digital transformation.

The solution is structured into five groups of capabilities, categorized as:

• Database design
• Database management
• Application development
• Advanced analytics
• Data virtualization

There are three more SAP products that work alongside SAP HANA and complete the experience for users together. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a ready-to-run cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). SAP BW/4HANA is a packaged data warehouse, based on SAP HANA, which allows users to consolidate data across the enterprise to get a consistent view of their data. Finally, SAP Cloud is a single database as a service (DBaaS) foundation for modern applications and analytics across all enterprise data. All three products can combine with SAP HANA to deliver to users an optimized experience regarding their data.

SAP HANA Features

Each architectural group of capabilities of SAP HANA has various features that users can benefit from. These include:

• Parallel processing database: SAP HANA utilizes a single platform to run transactional and analytical workloads.
  
  
• ACID compliance: This feature ensures compliance with requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards.
  
  
• Multi-tenancy: This feature allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system while sharing the same memory and processors.
  
  
• Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: SAP HANA's native storage extension is a built-in capability to manage between memory and persistent storage, including SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.
  
  
• Scaling: The scaling feature supports terabytes of data in a single server and distributes large tables across multiple servers in a cluster to scale further.
  
  
• Data modeling: This feature consists of graphical modeling tools that enable collaboration between stakeholders and the creation of models to execute complex business logic and data transformation in real time.
  
  
• Stored procedures: The product has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic.
  
  
• Administration: This feature consists of administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automations.
  
  
• Security: SAP HANA provides its users with real-time data anonymization features to extract value from data while protecting privacy.
  
  
• Availability and recovery: The tool supports high availability and disaster recovery through an array of techniques, including backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.
  
  
• Extended application services: Through its built-in application server, users can develop services such as REST and ODATA, as well as web applications that can run on multiple locations.
  
  
• Client access: The product offers clients the ability to access it via other application platforms and languages, including Java, JavaScript, R, and Go.
  
  
• Application lifecycle management: This set of features facilitates the building and packaging of applications, transporting them for development to test to production, and then deploying them.
  
  
• Application development: This feature consists of a set of tools that offer application development on premises and in the Cloud. The programming language ABAP includes additional optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.
  
  
• Search: The search feature uses SQL to locate text promptly across multiple columns and textual content.
  
  
• Spatial processing: This product feature provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions.
  
  
• Graph: Through this feature, users of the product can store and process highly connected data using a property graph.
  
  
• Streaming analytics: This feature combines various data sources that users can utilize to discover trends over a set period.
  
  
• Data integration and replication: The solution offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios.
  
  
• Data federation: This feature allows users to perform queries on remote data sources in real time with data federation.
  
  
• Caching: The capacity to cache data provides users with the ability to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data.

SAP HANA Benefits

SAP HANA provides many benefits for its users. These include:

• This solution offers a high level of data and application security, beginning from a secure setup and providing continuous support.
  
  
• SAP HANA offers augmentation for applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML).
  
  
• The solution works in a timely manner, as it provides a response to queries within seconds in large production applications.
  
  
• SAP HANA simplifies work, as it provides a single gateway to all user data with advanced data virtualization.
  
  
• The product is very flexible, as it allows users to deploy applications in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on premises, or hybrid.
  
  
• SAP HANA scales easily for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment.
  
  
• This is a powerful solution in terms of querying large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database.
  
  
• SAP HANA is a versatile product that supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing as well as many data types.
  
  
• The product provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication or advanced compression, and reduces data silos.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database consultant at a pharma/biotech company, SAP HANA is a very robust solution with good data access.

Bruno V., owner at LAVORO AUTOM INF E COM LTDA, likes SAP HANA because the product offers advanced features, helps reduce hours, and makes it easy to find what you need.

SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) by Microsoft. The product's main purposes are to store data and retrieve it as requested by other software applications - on the same computer or on another computer across a shared network. The solution is built on top of Structured Query Language (SQL), which is a standardized programming language used for relational database management.

The product is tied to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), which is an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds several proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. SQL Server is built similarly to other RDBMS products, as its structure is a row-based table that connects related data elements in different tables to one another. One of its most important components is the SQL Server Database Engine, as it controls data processing, storage, and security. Beneath the Database Engine is the SQL Server Operating System, which is used for memory and I/O management, locking data to avoid unneeded upgrades, and job scheduling.

The solution has four editions with different sets of services and tools. They include:

• SQL Server Developer
• SQL Server Expression
• SQL Server Standard 
• SQL Server Enterprise

The first two are available for free and are typically utilized by smaller companies, as they work with fewer functions and storage. The second two editions are generally used by bigger organizations and enterprises and offer more features.

The solution has several functions through which users can facilitate different data-related processes. These include:

• Aggregate functions: These functions are used to calculate one or more values and return a single value.
  
  
• Window functions: Window functions calculate an aggregate value based on a group of rows and return multiple rows for each involved group.
  
  
• Date functions: These functions allow clients to handle data and time data efficiently.
  
  
• String functions: Through the string functions, SQL Server processes an input string and returns a string or numeric value.
  
  
• System functions: The system functions of the product return objects, values, and settings.

SQL Server Services

SQL Server has a wide range of add-on services that provide additional benefits beyond database management. These services include:

• Machine learning: SQL Server machine learning services allow users to do machine learning and data analytics within the product.
   
• Service broker: This feature is a part of the database engine and offers messaging and message queuing for applications on the platform.
  
  
• Replication: This feature consists of transaction replication, merge replication, and snapshot replication. 
  
  
• Analysis: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) adds online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining capabilities to SQL Server databases.
  
  
• Reporting: This feature supports the development of custom reporting applications.
  
  
• Notifications: This feature generates data-driven notifications which are sent to subscribers of Notification Services.
  
  
• Integration: This SQL Server feature provides capabilities for data integration, data import, and data warehousing.
  
  
• Full-text search: Through this feature, users can utilize specialized indexing and query for unstructured text stored in the solution.
  
  
• Visual studio: This feature supports data programming with SQL Server.
  
  
• Azure Data Studio: This is a cross-platform query editor that can be downloaded and used alongside SQL Server.

SQL Server Benefits

The solution has many benefits for users. These include the following:

• The platform ensures a consistent experience across other platforms while being fast and agile.
  
  
• Through the built-in intelligence features, users can understand their data better.
  
  
• The solution has enterprise-level security, which ensures the smooth and safe performance of users' data.
  
  
• SQL Server offers the ability to retrieve large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
  
  
• The product installation process is fairly easy, and it offers a user-friendly interface.
  
  
• SQL Server offers improved data storage and retrieval functions through frequent upgrades.
  
  
• The solution reduces the risk of database server attacks, since it is not an open-source database.

Reviews from Real Users

A president at a consultancy evaluates SQL Server as a veteran solution with critical log shipping feature. 

Harkamal S., a user at a manufacturing company, rates SQL Server with a high mark because it is a stable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy solution that pretty much covers everything.

Teradata is a multi-cloud data platform company that provides data warehouse and relational database tools. The brand has an extensive portfolio of big data analytic solutions, integrated marketing applications, and services. The products that Teradata offers can be categorized in the following ways:

• Software: The products in this category include Teradata Vantage, an advanced SQL engine and Teradata database.
  
  
• Cloud: The solutions can work with popular cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and VMware. Teradata Cloud and customer cloud are also included in this product category.
  
  
• Ecosystem management: The products in this section include IntelliSphere, business continuity manager, data lab, data mover, data stream, QueryGrid, and viewpoint.
  
  
• Hardware: This category includes backup, archive, and restore (BAR) and IntelliFlex.
  
  
• Applications: Master data management (MDM) and Teradata analytics for enterprise applications are the two products in this category.

One of the most popular and commonly used products by Teradata is Teradata Vantage. This is a connected multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics. The product unifies data lakes, analytics, and data warehouses, as well as data sources and types. The solution offers its customers scalability, which allows them to scale dimensions to handle massive workloads of data. Teradata Vantage utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power more models and enhance quality.

Through Vantage Console, businesses can benefit from role-based, no-code software to organize and manage their data. The product offers deployment on many popular public clouds, on premises, and on commodity hardware. Teradata Vantage unifies and integrates all data types from sources and provides companies with a single source of information. It achieves this by supporting all common data types and formats. The product also provides organizations with tools for monitoring, analyzing, and connecting data throughout the organizations.

Part of this product is also VantageCloud, which offers a modern cloud-native architecture as well as hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options. This solution offers new ways for clients to deploy their platforms. These include the next-generation, cloud-native architecture of Teradata VantageCloud Lake.

Teradata Features

The different products that Teradata offers have various features which facilitate data management for customers. Some of the key capabilities of the solutions offered by Teradata include:

• Connectivity: Users can benefit from connections to the mainframe or network-attached systems. The product provides its own extension for interaction with data stored in the tables. It also supports SQL.
  
  
• Linear scalability: Teradata solutions are highly scalable and linear. The solution can handle large volumes of data effectively while also supporting the ability to scale up to 2048 nodes.
  
  
• Load and unload utilities: The product offers features to move data in and out of the product's system effectively.
  
  
• Mature optimizer: Part of this feature is Teradata Optimizer, which is an advanced product that can handle up to 64 joins in a single query.
  
  
• Robust utilities: The solution includes multiple robust utilities in this category of features that facilitate data handling in and out of the product's systems. The tools include MultiLoad, FastLoad, and FastExport.
  
  
• Shared nothing architecture: This set of features, connected to the architecture of Teradata, is known as “shared nothing architecture” because the nodes, processors, and disks all work independently. These capacities ensure better value for a given task.
  
  
• Unlimited parallelism: These features divide large volumes of data into smaller processes that are executed in parallel. This contributes to the execution of complex tasks in a timely manner.

Teradata Benefits

Through its multiple solutions, Teradata offers various benefits for its clients. Some of these include:

• The solution facilitates prototype creation and offers faster times for completion.
  
  
• Through Teradata, users are able to use faster, simpler, and easier solutions for data-related tasks.
  
  
• The product eliminates the need for unnecessary data movement, which contributes to performance improvements.
  
  
• Teradata offers developers the ability to decide where in the architecture different parts of an application run.
  
  
• Teradata allows database administrators to manage databases from a single point of control.
  
  
• The solution provides the option to get the same data on multiple deployment options.
  
  
• The product supports Online Analytical Programming (OLAP) functions, which allows it to perform a complex analytical process of data.
  
  
• Teradata uses the Service Workstation to provide a single operation view for the multi-node system of the product.

Reviews from Real Users

Martin P., a services manager at Bytes Systems Integration, describes Teradata as a product that is very fast with good database control and excellent support.

Blaine V., principal at Insight Data Consulting, rates Teradata highly because of its excellent native features, highly stable, and impressive automation.