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SAP HANA vs Spark SQL comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SAP HANA
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (1st), Relational Databases Tools (3rd), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (3rd)
Spark SQL
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Bassem Mohammed - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Application Manager at TBTD
Integrated business processes have improved real-time analytics and financial performance
Whether I or my customers utilize SAP HANA's real-time analytics depends on the data needed to be displayed, and then choosing how to transfer the data to the analytic object, data source, or database to be displayed in the reports. It may be near real-time, real-time, or running batch every day. There are tools for integration between third-party systems, such as OData or APIs from SAP to get in or push data to other systems. Support for both structured and unstructured data helps organizations unify data sources depending on the needed data to be displayed. There are many ways to store it for report displays, but structured data will be better than unstructured data.
Kemal Duman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, Data Engineering at Nesine.com
Data pipelines have run faster and support flexible batch and streaming transformations
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource management in Spark SQL should be better. It consumes more resources, which is normal. The main reason we switched from Spark is memory and CPU consumption. The major reason is the resource problem because the number of streaming jobs has been increasing in our company. That is why we considered resource management as a priority. Because of the resource consumption, I would say the development of Spark SQL is better. For development purposes, it is a top product and not difficult to work with, but resources are the major problem. We changed to Flink regardless of development time. Development time is less in Spark compared with Flink.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The product handles high volumes very well and provides good integration."
"The most valuable feature of SAP HANA is the modeling of the databases."
"Previously we were using MySQL, but due to the fast performance of SAP HANA, we switched approximately three years ago."
"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."
"A very feature-rich solution with excellent performance."
"This is a feature-rich product and I like all of them."
"As I only worked part-time on SAP HANA, I did not have the opportunity to explore the advanced features of the solution. However, I did work with basic features, such as user administration and access controls for the accounting department. The feature that stood out to me the most was the Single Sign-On and user administration, backup, and server management. My experience with SAP HANA was mainly focused on basic server improvements."
"SAP HANA is one of the best databases known for its performance...The new version of the solution is stable."
"Overall the solution is excellent."
"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."
"We use it to gather all the transaction data."
"Spark SQL gives us a handful of methods to design queries based on its own syntax and also incorporates the regular SQL syntax within tasks."
"The speed of getting data."
"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"The performance is one of the most important features, and it has an API to process the data in a functional manner."
 

Cons

"I give the scalability of SAP HANA a six out of ten."
"It could be a bit more scalable."
"Uses a large amount of RAM and is costly."
"The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"I would not recommend SAP HANA because it has some issues with the speed and scalability of the size. It's also extremely expensive."
"The documentation can be improved in the future."
"The main issue is the ecosystem, which lacks the widespread support that SQL enjoys."
"Because SAP HANA is completely in-memory, it requires the use of bigger systems which have a higher amount of RAM. If the system does go down then coming back up is difficult and can take 30 to 40 minutes."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"There should be better integration with other solutions."
"There are many inconsistencies in syntax for the different querying tasks like selecting columns and joining between two tables so I'd like to see a more consistent syntax."
"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."
"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is a bit on the high side."
"There is a yearly subscription to use SAP HANA. There is a fee for maintenance."
"SAP HANA is very expensive for small to medium businesses."
"The pricing for SAP HANA is high. You pay a lot for the license, and you also have to pay for some add-ons."
"The price of SAP HANA is very expensive and it is paid annually."
"We are spending about 20,000 to 30,000 euros on the solution."
"The price of this product is good."
"The tool’s subscription is yearly."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The on-premise solution is quite expensive in terms of hardware, setting up the cluster, memory, hardware and resources. It depends on the use case, but in our case with a shared cluster which is quite large, it is quite expensive."
"We don't have to pay for licenses with this solution because we are working in a small market, and we rely on open-source because the budgets of projects are very small."
"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise64
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest benefits of using SAP HANA?
Based on my work with SAP HANA, the biggest benefit that it can bring to your business is total data management. This product is by SAP - a company that serves almost all needs a client may have co...
Is SAP HANA’s customer and technical support reliable?
We have been using SAP HANA for a fairly short period of time and have only taken advantage of their customer support. So far, we have not had issues that required specialized help from technical s...
Is SAP HANA difficult to set up and start using?
SAP HANA is fairly easy to set up, however, I do not think a complete beginner can do it. You certainly need some preparation - either you need to have experience with similar solutions, or with ot...
What needs improvement with Spark SQL?
We do not have any performance problems, but we do have some resource problems. Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink. Resource manageme...
What is your primary use case for Spark SQL?
Spark SQL has been in our stack for less than one year, though some of our colleagues are using it. It is a useful product for transformation jobs. We generally use Spark SQL for batch processing. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Spark SQL?
Regarding the Catalyst query optimizer, I think we are using it. We were using it in the past, but I am not certain if we use it now. We used it a long time ago. I rate my experience with Spark SQL...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Unilever, NHS 24, adidas Group, CHIO Aachen, Hamburg Port Authority (HPA), Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited
UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, Alibaba Taobao, Kenshoo, Hitachi Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.