SAP HANA Reviews

I've recently left the company where we were using SAP HANA. Our use case was for replication so that end users could use dashboard reports. I'm a senior manager.

It's great that the analytics are fast. I had previously worked on BW and when the same workloads were run on HANA, it was much quicker. 

We had some issues where the data was not replicating and also problems with the target when some records didn't sync up. Even though we worked on the problem together with SAP, and they were very helpful, it took some time to resolve.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

I don't think best practices were followed with the initial setup so we had frequent issues with the CPU utilization and we'd have to restart the system. We later implemented some threshold-related parameters on the VM which solved the problems we were having. It was stable after that. 

The solution is definitely scalable, we had around 1,000 users. 

Customer service was very supportive. When needed, we had daily calls with SAP which was great. They also worked with us to address our major issue and were accessible daily by phone. 

Positive

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It can be done in a couple of modes; command line or the graphical interface. There are five or six components that get installed and deployment takes a maximum of an hour. It doesn't require much manpower. 

We've seen an ROI in terms of the speed with which reports come through. 

I would recommend this solution. The HANA database provided a lot of improvement in terms of speed, agility and efficiency.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We use this solution to custom build features. We are customers of SAP HANA and I'm a solutions manager working for a retail company in Finland. 

The product handles high volumes very well and provides good integration. HANA has great databases and we're able to have a lot of custom-built features. I think this is the best solution for us given our high file volumes.

The SAP ERP processes are quite complex for us and it's a challenge. I don't like the presentation layer tools on the analytics side, it's too complex. I'd like to see a consistent analytic system as those tools and their capabilities are not easy to select. An alternative could be for them to offer the option of access to other solutions.

I think the solution is relatively stable but in some cases, it can depend on the service provider and their capabilities. We handle about 40 promoters, all in Finland and dealing with high volumes. Our market set is very high here.

I think it is highly scalable but it comes at a financial cost. We currently have around 1,000 users. 

We use the support when we need it but we have quite good capabilities ourselves. If we're having some challenges then it can take time to have them resolved or to find the root cause of the problem. We've had some ongoing challenges that have taken quite a while to resolve. 

If you have some experience, the initial setup is quite easy. 

We are always discussing ways to optimize memory usage and hence our licensing costs. The solution is quite expensive but we also get a lot of value-added because of the high level of integration. I think it's worth the money but it's a fine balance. 

I would recommend SAP HANA solution for ERP but not necessarily for analytics. There is no other solution that can provide the value added that we get from SAP, despite the challenges. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.

We are primarily using the solution for the BW system of SAP. We also use the legacy reporting, which is very good.

The solution is quite fast.

We hoped to move all our BI systems to work with HANA, unfortunately, there are a lot of performance issues, even after remodeling the BW models.

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.

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've been using the solution for about 3 years

The solution is less stable than traditional databases. We have encountered several cases when the database just flows. For some reason, that database took a lot of memory, and when we opened a case with SAP, we had to send a lot of logs, which did nothing because at the end, they couldn't find the root cause for this issue. This happened in several cases. We had production down and that's not acceptable for our business.

The solution is very scalable. We have about 10,000 users.

Each of those is not connecting to the database per se, but we are using HANA to take all the data and a lot of users. Several other software applications are also connecting to it.

Technical support is okay, but not great. It seems like there are a lot of SAP support packages that are coming out and lots of versions. For me, this indicates that the product is not quite ready or stable enough.

We've contacted technical support in the past and did not get good results. Eventually, we just created some parameters that we have configured into the system. We solved the problem by ourselves by creating a workaround that avoided the problem. SAP never gave us a straight answer about what we should do in our case.

The initial setup was quite complicated. We had to do a migration, so it wasn't a fresh installation. We had Oracle as our legacy system and had to move everything over to HANA. We had to do half a year of testing and had to do several cycles of tests and migrations before deploying. Once that was done, we deployed over a weekend.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd advise others to wait until the software will be much more stable before implementing it.

I'd rate it eight out of ten. If it was more stable and more manageable, I'd rate it higher. If people could have the ability to do things on their own within the solution, to read the software logs on their own, and get the root cause of any problem, and not just send it to the support, it would be much better.

The memory capabilities are great.

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

I've used Oracle for ten years, and yet, I find SAP better than Oracle. Oracle is more cost-based.

Oracle tends to have better features than SAP HANA. They should work to add the kinds of features clients expect from Oracle.

With Oracle, you can install their cloud and that enables you to see more of the database and multiple accounts. This is better than what SAP has on offer.

SAP could really work on its monitoring capabilities.

There's data aging that needs to be dealt with on the solution. It's not ideal. You might have a lot of raw data and aging can really affect it.

It would be help if the solution had a graph database. They're lacking that right now.

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've been using the solution for about five years at this point. It's been about half a decade.

The scalability of the solution is pretty good. We don't have any problems in that area.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. It wasn't that good. Sometimes the information we received from them wasn't accurate. It's a difficult solution. I would say, to be fair, that their support is better than Oracle's.

In the case of Oracle, I had an issue once with Oracle GoldenGate. It took two weeks to resolve the issue. That's far too long. SAP is much more responsive. It's never taken two weeks to resolve anything.

We also used Oracle. We find SAP to be very fast. It's much faster than Oracle.

The initial setup was five years ago, so it's been a while. However, I do recall it being straightforward. We typically install a version on Linux. While it can be difficult, at the moment, it's pretty good. Things have changed a bit, and they've improved the setup a bit. It's not really that unsimilar to Microsoft's SQL server.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with SAP.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

We use an on-premises version and e have a private cloud in our company.

I'd recommend the solution. If you have, for example, a huge project that's kind of a unique, scalable database I recommend SAP HANA for it. It's easy to use and handles more RAM.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use SAP HANA for Master Data Governance.

The solution needs to work on its performance and make it faster.

I have been working with the solution for four years.

I am satisfied with the tool’s stability.

I would rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. Our company has four users for the solution.

The solution’s tech support is good.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. The deployment took around six months to complete.

The tool’s subscription is yearly.

I would rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. You can use the solution if it meets your requirements.

We are currently using the solution for planning, sourcing, and ordering from a contract perspective.

We have found that the Fiori Apps are particularly good.

I would like to see improvement on the feedback from the road-map; it is currently extremely hard to get insight in this area.

I have been using this solution for four years.

The stability of this solution is extremely good.

We have found it to be extremely scalable.

The initial setup was complex, but this was due to the nature of the current project which is large and complex. However, for smaller projects, it has been more straightforward.

The implementation was carried out in-house, and we also implement the solution for our customers.

The price of licensing is dependent on the size of the project, however, we have found that there is scope to negotiate the cost.

If the solution is implemented on-premises there may be some extra costs for hosting etc.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten.

I was using the product for some research in technical drawings - in terms of making some drawings, the different parts, and the structure of the machinery. I don't know if it's available in the SAP HANA, however, there is a model for this to schedule the maintenance. The company wasn't using it. Sometimes the product furnishes a lot of insights, cultural insights that the company still is not ready to implement.

The solution offers advanced features that the company was struggling to implement. For example, in terms of parts, you can't implement a lot of structures of the machinery, however, you still need to use the codes. They're not related one to another, which makes them hard to find, typically. That means every time you need it to buy an entire assembly of parts, you need to know exactly which one you had. You have to use a drawing, a technical drawing, that specifies each code that you need. SAP saves you from asking to bring an entire assembly with a lot of parts. That's a powerful aspect that could help to reduce hours of work that are wasted in this way.

A documents preview could be helpful. Today we have a lot of documents, for example, in PDF formats, which we would like to preview. We'd even just like to click on an icon and have it open another tab. That way, I can see the document directly inside SAP HANA. In the company I was working with, we had a parallel system which meant we needed to go to SAP, see the code, see the drawing number, and then go to another system that is finished by Autodesk, and then find the drawing and open it. This is a lot of work.

I really would like to just have it inside this app. 

I'd like the product to have more mobile aspects. Many younger users want mobility and flexibility.

The solution can be expensive. In Brazil, many companies still do pretty much everything in Brazil, and, if they want to try a new solution, they want to try it at zero cost. Many, therefore, will look for open-source solutions before they even consider SAP.

I've used the solution over the last 12 months. 

It's very stable. Sometimes it gets a little slow, however, that might be a company issue. When it came to the internet the entire site wasn't that good. Sometimes you had too many people connecting and the company was using a lot of Google solutions. You noticed that when a lot of people are in virtual meetings, we would have internet connections affected.

I'm not sure about the scalability.

I don't know if you can use it in a Docker or if you can scale it in SQL and you can maintain the speed, or if you are talking about, for example, big data. The infrastructure of the company seemed to be weighed down, for example, when there were a lot of virtual meetings and it affected the internet. I can't speak to if this problem would also affect being able to scale the product.

I would describe technical support as good. It's always worked for me and therefore I have no complaints. 

I didn't handle the initial implementation. The company furnished all the equipment needed for me to work. They gave me the computer, which Red Hat was installed on. They just give me access and showed me where to access what I needed and where to put the ID and password. I didn't do anything.

Typically there are six people that are available for maintenance tasks. They're IT technicians.

SAP solutions are typically quite expensive.

I'm a partner and consultant. 

I'm not sure which version of the product I am on.

I'd advise new users that it's important to first find a solution that can understand the culture that's involved inside this solution. Sometimes people think that ERP software like SAP are magical things that you just install it and it makes life easier. It doesn't work like this. You need to have the culture, you have to have this knowledge. You need to understand how it works and how much it requires from you. It requires more than you think. It doesn't work like magic.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's very good, however, there's always room for improvement. 

What is good about SAP HANA is its simplicity and its flexibility. 

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

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). 

It requires some internal SAP knowledge to work with the tool and it's a completely graphical modeling kind of a system. You can't come in cold with no knowledge or understanding of the solution and think you can jump in and start working.

You have to work with the very few tools that are given to you. It could probably increase its flexibility and there could be more components added, which would make it more versatile. They could improve the solution by adding more components and by making it more feature-rich and including typical features that other more popular tools have.

There needs to be better support from the SAP support team. There needs to be more support for other programming languages like high-level C++, Java, or Python. That could be another improvement. 

HANA needs more integration with open-source tools, and with general reporting and analytics tools that are out there on the market. Once again, more integration on so many levels would be amazing. It's very SAP-centric and very proprietary right now. There are ways to connect SAP HANA with many tools already, however, in particular with open-source tools, if there could be even more integration, that would be helpful.

There needs to be more data transformation and more ELT features that can be implemented in the view. 

While I'm not exactly sure how long the company itself has used the solution, I've been dealing with it for four years at this point. It's been a while.

In terms of stability, I can't comment much. It depends on the underlying system and infrastructure, and it has the same kind of stability as any other on-premise solution. It doesn't have any cloud features such as multiple replication and multiple locations, et cetera. In that sense, it has the same stability as any other on-premise solution and does not guarantee any SLA. 

In terms of scalability, it's quite scalable. We've used it for production solutions very often and from any number of users. Generally, there are a few hundred users or so. I have not really worked on an implementation that uses thousands of users or anything that big, so I can't really comment on massive scaling. However, if it's for enterprise applications that have a few hundred internal users, it's good. 

The community support needs to be better. I haven't been impressed with it. In general, it just needs better support.

I have only worked on SAP and I haven't worked on other solutions.

I don't have information on the pricing, as that is an SAP and corporate-level agreement, which is not really known by all the in-house teams. I'm not really aware of the pricing. On the internet, I couldn't find much information about the cost of SAP HANA. I have heard that it is an expensive option. Being an enterprise-level solution, however, I don't have exact numbers. 

I'm not really part of the decision making team or the architecture team. I do not know if my organization has a business relationship with SAP or not.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten.

In the case of enterprise projects, I've heard that SAP HANA is used very widely. I would say, in general, it would be good to explore other alternatives, and not just go with HANA. It would be good to explore big data alternatives that are out there. They might be a better fit. Databricks these days seems to be quite popular. It might be an interesting alternative for some organizations. Depending on the use case, I'd recommend that other alternatives should be considered. If it's a reporting solution that people are building, which is using a lot of SAP internal data, then SAP HANA is a good option. Otherwise, other alternatives are out there.