We performed a comparison between SAP HANA and SQL Server based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Because SAP HANA’s users say its pricing, support, and ease of deployment could all be greatly improved, SQL Server ultimately wins out in this comparison.
"The functionality is of the solution is very good."
"It is difficult for me to narrow down what the best features are in SAP HANA because they work together to provide the overall functionality of the solution. However, the Fiori application is very good."
"I like the integration process. Also, the data is trusted by our management, and we use the data from transactions for analysis."
"The solution is easy to scale."
"It is very flexible to integrate with SaaS components."
"The best feature of SAP HANA is column computing. The computing speed of the solution is also very high, so developers can easily develop programs through SAP HANA."
"We've had good experiences with technical support."
"If you want to scale with new processes and new reports, that's fairly easy."
"Very stable relational database management system that offers ease of management, querying, and scaling. It has well-designed databases."
"The most valuable features for database management in SQL Server are SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio Code with its administration capabilities."
"Its security is good. The GUI of SQL Server is also very good."
"SQL Server is a very mature solution."
"It is secure, and it is fast. For our present database size, we are using the Always-On feature on SQL Server so that our transactions are replicated among three servers. If one server goes down, we can find the data from other servers. We have benefited from this feature."
"I value the ability it gives me to test on small machines and easily scale up to larger devices for live applications."
"The performance is great."
"The product has been on the market for over 25 or 30 years. It's an extremely mature solution."
"Technical support could be better."
"SAP HANA isn't user-friendly, and it's very hard to train newcomers to use it."
"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."
"SAP HANA is not perfect and they could improve by having more options and more integration."
"Unlike other databases, it lacks management features that legacy databases like Oracle or SQL servers have. They need to make the solution easier to manage and offer tools that make management more effective. A lot of things you have on traditional databases you have to develop into HANA."
"While new users to this solution have the benefit of the new design, existing ERP users may experience issues with migrating legacy data. We would like to see development of ready-made tools that allow for easy mapping when upgrading."
"The challenge right now is all databases are on S4 HANA architecture. You're running it for HANA, but not all the functionalities are available. If they can speed up getting all the databases on S4 HANA that would help."
"What needs improvement in SAP HANA is its automation, in particular, it needs more enhancements in that area."
"I would like the SQL Server to be able to provide cloud support. We use the solution with a Korean provider supporting only MySQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server, which would be preferable and cheaper. This would prevent us from having to pay for troubleshooting and hosting the server."
"When transferring data from the SQL Server to Excel, the data types are not copied correctly. This issue might be associated with the formatting of the data types."
"I would like to see native plugins built for other platforms versus having to buy third-party plugins to tap into S3 buckets and AWS Cloud. Right now, it does not have those built-in plugins."
"Since this is a relational order system, scalability has a limit. If your system is very big, you need bigger servers and you have to spend more money. We scale a system up to a certain level, and then we move or shift data to the warehouse, which is NoSQL. We then do not have any bottleneck in scaling. For using this technique we are happy with it."
"Scalability of the database could be improved if it could handle increased volumes of data."
"The product overall would benefit from the addition of better tutorials to help master the skills necessary to actually build a project database. Right now, what is available isn't sufficient."
"The agility of the non-SQL-based features is relevant on the market."
"The scalability is adequate but could improve."
SAP HANA is ranked 3rd in Relational Databases Tools with 79 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. SAP HANA is rated 8.4, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP HANA writes "Excellent compatibility between modules and the control". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". SAP HANA is most compared with Oracle Database, MySQL, IBM Db2 Database, Apache Spark and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, Oracle Database, LocalDB, IBM Db2 Database and Teradata. See our SAP HANA vs. SQL Server report.
See our list of best Relational Databases Tools vendors.
We monitor all Relational Databases Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.