Oracle Database Cloud Service vs SAP HANA vs SQL Server comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Oracle Database Cloud Service, SAP HANA, and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools.
To learn more, read our detailed Relational Databases Tools Report (Updated: March 2024).
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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Database Cloud Service is its cloud capabilities.""It is a very stable program.""Oracle DCS's most valuable features are its high availability and scalability.""The product’s most valuable feature is affordable pricing compared to other providers.""What I like best about Oracle Database Cloud Service is its nice performance. My company doesn't have any problems with the service. The technical support for it is also good. My company is satisfied with Oracle Database Cloud Service. I also like the availability of the service. It's a trustworthy service. I didn't experience any downtime from it. My company also has additional features included in the contract, such as WAP, which makes operations easier. My team can implement all the architecture with the features and services that Oracle Database Cloud Service offers. Technically, this is a very, very, good product or database, whether on-premises or on the cloud.""Security is the most valuable feature provided by the product.""I am impressed with the product's partitioning and advanced data card.""Data storage is the most valuable feature of Oracle Database Cloud Service."

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"The memory is the solution's most valuable feature. It's the main feature of HANA. Others are still the regular IT databases that are on storage and are therefore much slower than HANA. The solution is quite fast.""SAP HANA is a stable solution.""The performance is very, very good. It's one of the best aspects of the solution.""It's stable and reliable.""It is very stable and very innovative. You can integrate many applications with it.""SAP HANA's interface is pretty user-friendly.""If you want to scale with new processes and new reports, that's fairly easy.""We can save data very easily."

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"The ease of administration, in general, is the solution's most valuable aspect.""We found it to be quite scalable.""The technical support is good.""In Poland, SQL Server is the most popular database engine, and overall, our customers like it.""SQL Server Profiler makes finding and debugging easy.""SQL Server scales well.""As a data warehouse and storage solution, it's quite good.""The solution has a reliable database."

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Cons
"The initial setup is a bit complex for the beginner, so you need a little technical experience to install it.""Oracle Database Cloud Service could improve by adding some cross-region replication features.""The pricing must be improved.""We encountered connection failures for some of our sites.""Oracle Database Cloud Service is a good engine and at the moment, there isn't any new feature I can think of that I'd like added to the service. The only problem I see in Oracle Database Cloud Service is it's more commercial, so it has a relation to how it deals with customers. I don't feel secure in a deal with Oracle because that team changes the conditions each year, and there's no representative from the team that talks to my company about new needs. Oracle needs to improve its relationship with customers and partners in general.""It would be nice to have a data dictionary reporting feature in the solution.""Oracle should work on the solution's compatibility issues with the operating system.""We're actually going through licensing issues and are looking to perhaps changing to another solution, something that is perhaps open-source."

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"The relationship with a partner that sells SAP could be better. We depend much more on our own development, and the partner is for selling us the solutions, so we need them to be able to supply help and answers. The partner isn't very helpful, and we have to rely on our own knowledge and research.""In terms of improvement, the speed is not as good as we thought it would be. That is why we are trying different solutions that will be built with different technologies.""In a future release, SAP HANA should add a module for taxation, such as income tax and withholding tax.""SAP HANA is not perfect and they could improve by having more options and more integration.""There's an issue in the partition. When you record more than two million records, partitioning does not work well. In Oracle it's easy. SAP must resolve this issue in order to be more competitive with Oracle.""I'd just like to see some more improvements done on the training, both on the functional training and technical training sides as a part of the complete solution.""The worst thing about SAP HANA is the price; it's very expensive. The licensing cost, implementation cost, hosting cost, and appliance cost are all high.""FI, or the financial module of SAP, has room for improvement. It has to have some better localization for the Middle East, especially in regards to taxes and the letter of credit cycle. I would like to see better localization from the HCM."

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"SQL Server could improve the integration with nonrational database solutions, such as MongoDB.""I would like to see more integration with other products and it needs to be more secure.""CAL licenses should cost less. Microsoft usually prices high for client access licenses. Server plus user client access license (CAL) licensing requires a separate Server license for each server on which the software is installed, plus a user CAL for each user accessing the server.""The reporting services of the solution (SSRS and now Power BI) are the less valuable items of the SQL Server suite.""In the next releases, I would only like more enhanced backups and more restore points.""It would definitely be better if SQL Server were free.""In terms of what could be improved, everything on-premise is now moving to the cloud. Obviously SQL Server has also moved, because Microsoft Excel has its own cloud called Azure Finance. Every solution comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.""The agility of the non-SQL-based features is relevant on the market."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I think the program is rather expensive, so I would like to see it becoming more affordable."
  • "Pricing for Oracle Database Cloud Service could be more competitive. Lately, pricing for it has been increasing, so my company may have to review different options to find a solution with competitive pricing. From what I know, there's no additional cost apart from the standard licensing fees for Oracle Database Cloud Service."
  • "The tool is not cheap."
  • "Every year we are increasing the price of the solution. There is hardware licensing available. We pay approximately $20,000 monthly to use the solution."
  • "Price is always higher for all Oracle products."
  • "The product has reasonable pricing. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten."
  • More Oracle Database Cloud Service Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Set up a consortium of consulting partners and hardware vendors to define your tech. Landscape TCO (total cost of ownership) and then approach the OEM for pricing (on-premise or on cloud or a hybrid model). Check if you can bring your own licenses for some of the existing application licenses on the new platform, to reduce TCO."
  • "People who are technical will accept the cost, but financially they will assess whether this solution will bring them revenue or not. People often ask, how will I profit when the cost is so high?"
  • "It is expensive, which isn't a problem for us because SAP HANA is processing the data so fast."
  • "SAP HANA is an expensive product."
  • "It is expensive."
  • "Setup and licensing require planning and proper budgeting, as it is not cheap."
  • "The price of the solution could be reduced, it is expensive."
  • "The price of this product is good."
  • More SAP HANA Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The free version is cumbersome to use and maintain. But $5000 for a licence is more expense than the benefit I would get from a licensed version. A licence might be worth the price to simplify management and speed up searches."
  • "​We are a Microsoft shop, so we use Active Directory. That integrates well with this product, but we did look at Oracle. We also looked at IBM. This was the best price point for us for what we were getting.​"
  • "​It has the easiest licensing."
  • "This is a downside of enterprise Microsoft products."
  • "Currently, almost all of my machines are in Azure and I think it is the best way of licensing now (VM+software)."
  • "The price has been going higher and higher. The market is quite price sensitive."
  • "My advice is quite straightforward. If you know the number of users who really and truly need access to the Server then it is a no-brainer. If you do not know, then get the basic package and minimum licenses and start from there. Needless to say, users can develop/use data structures outside and then deploy onto the Server."
  • "The setup cost is high, but it will return every penny."
  • More SQL Server Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Security is the most valuable feature provided by the product.
    Top Answer:We are an enterprise software development firm. We use the solution for our products.
    Top Answer:Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This… more »
    Top Answer:We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support… more »
    Top Answer:SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some… more »
    Top Answer:SQL Server is fairly priced because it has various editions, depending on the number of users, servers, or core packs… more »
    Top Answer:SQL Server has helped my organization through partitioning to distribute the workload, as it splits them up into smaller… more »
    Top Answer:My company connects through SQL Server authentication. We have company Windows accounts, but we do not want to connect… more »
    Ranking
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    297
    Comparisons
    261
    Reviews
    7
    Average Words per Review
    321
    Rating
    8.3
    Views
    16,752
    Comparisons
    11,792
    Reviews
    39
    Average Words per Review
    398
    Rating
    8.5
    Views
    33,485
    Comparisons
    25,100
    Reviews
    26
    Average Words per Review
    361
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA
    Microsoft SQL Server, MSSQL, MS SQL
    Learn More
    Overview

    Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service (Exadata Service) delivers the world's best Cloud Database Platform by combining the world's #1 database with Exadata, the most powerful database platform, and adding all the simplicity and cost effectiveness of the public cloud.

    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.

    Sample Customers
    Kagool, iPoint-Systems
    Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited
    Microsoft SQL Server is used by businesses in every industry, including Great Western Bank, Aviva, the Volvo Car Corporation, BMW, Samsung, Principality Building Society, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario.
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Government12%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    Educational Organization7%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Energy/Utilities Company11%
    Retailer9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Comms Service Provider5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization42%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise61%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise39%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise48%
    Large Enterprise39%
    Buyer's Guide
    Relational Databases Tools
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and others in Relational Databases Tools. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.