SAP HANA Pros and Cons

SAP HANA is vertically and horizontally scalable.

Its in-memory capabilities are good, which is why many companies still use it.

The most value for us was in terms of using it to issue tenders online. We host our server, but it is open to the public, so clients who want to buy those tenders were able to go online, put their tender documents up, and we could evaluate them using SAP.

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.

The solution is extremely stable. That's the most important aspect of the solution, for our organization. There is no downtime, and the performance is very good.

We've had good experiences with technical support.

The performance in terms of processing time is unmatched due to the in-memory processing capability.

The performance is very, very good. It's one of the best aspects of the solution.

It has a very huge bandwidth and data transfer.

If you want to scale with new processes and new reports, that's fairly easy.

High availability and disaster recovery are very poor in HANA.

SAP HANA is a very proprietary tool and there's not as much support available for it as there is for an SQL Server (which is more popular).

The interface is a little bit hard to customize. You almost have to consult the SAP original developer to change it.

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.

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 solution is very expensive for us.

The product is very demanding on memory requirements.

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.

The solution is very expensive, however. The pricing depends on the number of users and many other factors that affect licensing.

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.