MySQL vs SAP HANA vs SQL Server comparison

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) owned by Oracle. Before Oracle acquired the product, it was completely free for users. After the merge, the solution started offering paid services with more features, alongside a free version. MySQL can easily integrate with a wide variety of programming languages, which makes it one of the most flexible and reliable products among its competitors. This cost-effective solution helps users deliver high-performance and scalable database applications through several products. They include:

• MySQL HeatWave: This is an in-memory query accelerator for MySQL. It is a parallel, columnar, hybrid query-processing engine with algorithms for distributed query processing. This database service is used for transactions, analytics, and machine learning (ML). It offers simplified, secure real-time analytics. It can be deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Amazon AWS, Azure, and users' data centers.
  
  
• My SQL Enterprise Edition: This edition of the solution includes the most comprehensive set of advanced features, technical support, and management tools. The combination functions achieves security, scalability, reliability, and uptime, while reducing risk, cost, and complexity, in managing MySQL applications.
  
  
• MySQL Standard Edition: This edition utilizes industrial-strength performance and reliability to help users deliver high-performance and scalable Open Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications.
  
  
• MySQL Classic Edition: This is an embedded database for independent software vendors (ISVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and value-added resellers (VARs), that are developing applications using the MyISAM storage engine.
  
  
• MySQL Community Edition: This is the free version of the product, which is supported by a large active community of open-source developers.
  
  
• MySQL Cluster CGE: This is a distributed database that combines linear scalability and high availability. It offers in-memory real-time access across partitioned and distributed databases.
  
  
• MySQL Embedded: This product offers MySQL as an embedded database and is most widely used by ISVs, OEMs, and VARs. It is utilized for making applications, hardware, and appliances more competitive by bringing them to market faster while lowering their cost of goods sold (COGs).

My SQL Features

The characteristics of each MySQL edition differ depending on what it offers and what clients it is catered towards. But the main features of the product include the following:

• Internals and portability: These capabilities allow MySQL to work on multiple platforms and provide transactional and non-transactional storage engines. This set of features is tested with Purify, Vilgrind, and a broad range of different compilers.
  
  
• Data types: Due to the flexibility of the data types feature of MySQL, the product is compatible with a very wide variety of data types, including fixed-length and variable-length string types.
  
  
• Statements and functions: This feature allows MySQL full operator and function support. It supports a wide variety of functions and allows users to refer to tables from different databases in the same statement.
  
  
• Security: The security features of MySQL provide users with a flexible privileged password system that enables host-based verification. The product offers encryption of all password traffic when users connect to a server.
  
  
• Scalability and limits: MySQL supports large databases with up to approximately 50 million records and up to 64 indexes per table.
  
  
• Connectivity: The connectivity features of the product allow clients to connect to MySQL using several protocols, providing them with freedom of choice in terms of which ones to use.
  
  
• Localization: Through this feature, the product offers availability to users in many languages. The server time zone can be changed dynamically and allows clients to specify their own time zone for their convenience.
  
  
• Clients and tools: The product includes several client and utility programs among its capabilities.

MySQL Benefits

MySQL brings many benefits to organizations that use it for their data. The most common ones include:

• Due to its initial open-source nature, MySQL is an easy to understand and beginner-friendly product.
  
  
• The solution still supports an open-source version as well, which means users can download, use, and modify it based on their requirements.
  
  
• MySQL ensures the consistency of data by storing it efficiently and minimizing redundancy.
  
  
• This is considered one of the fastest solutions on the market, a fact which is backed by many benchmark tests.
  
  
• MySQL is very flexible and supports a large number of embedded applications.
  
  
• The solution is compatible with many operating systems.
  
  
• This product offers clients the option to roll back transactions, as well as commit, and crash recovery.

Reviews from Real Users

According to a database engineer at a retailer with more than 10,000 employees, MySQL is a great open-source product that offers great scalability and compatibility.

Yong S., a solutions specialist, system integration, appreciates this product because it has different licensing options and is easy to set up.

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.