SAP HANA vs Spark SQL comparison

SAP and Apache are both solutions in the Hadoop category. Additionally, 91% of SAP users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of Apache users who would recommend it.

SAP HANA

Read 93 SAP HANA reviews

6,446 Views
580 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Spark SQL

Read 15 Spark SQL reviews

752 Views
662 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

SAP HANA

Spark SQL

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SAP HANA and Spark SQL based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Hadoop solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL

March 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 884,873 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

Data Virtualization (2nd), Embedded Database (2nd), Relational Databases Tools (3rd), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (3rd)

Spark SQL

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (5th)

Featured Reviews

Hari Priya

SAP Analytics Lead at Miracle Software Systems, Inc

Performs well with high database and reporting performance

We face difficulties replicating the AC DOCA table, which is a huge table, from S/4HANA to SAP HANA BAS, Business Application Studio, or HANA Studio using SLT. For developing Power BI reports using the AC DOCA table, we are replicating full data daily. We want to implement delta load, and while we used OData service for one client, the delta OData service link is not properly updating delta records. Licensing costs with SAP HANA are very high. Due to high pricing, many clients are moving from BW on SAP HANA and S/4HANA to Azure SQL. I have worked with several clients who have moved all data flows to Azure and developed Power BI queries on top of Azure. Many clients are also using Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The certification costs are also very high, more than ₹1,40,000 INR. Previously, it was ₹30,000 to ₹40,000. I want to pursue three certifications but am unable to do so due to the cost.

Read full review

Kemal Duman

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"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."

"The product handles high volumes very well and provides good integration."

"The functionality is of the solution is very good."

"SAP HANA's most valuable features are monitoring, reporting, and price and stock control."

"The data in HANA is stored in columns rather than rows, which speeds up searches and aggregations."

"The most valuable features of SAP HANA include its user-friendliness, flexibility, and extensive support for various functionalities like finance, logistics, and workforce processes."

"The benefits include high database loading performance, superior reporting performance, and ease of use."

More SAP HANA pros

"Data validation and ease of use are the most valuable features."

"The team members don't have to learn a new language and can implement complex tasks very easily using only SQL."

"The stability was fine. It behaved as expected."

"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."

"Overall the solution is excellent."

"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."

"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."

"I find the Thrift connection valuable."

More Spark SQL pros

Cons

"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."

"I would like to see improvements in the connectivity of the solution with other BI software. Not every software can connect to it natively."

"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."

"High availability and disaster recovery are very poor in HANA."

"I give the scalability of SAP HANA a six out of ten."

"The initial setup of SAP HANA is quite difficult as it has a steep learning curve."

"A documents preview could be helpful."

"Customer service can be improved. While issues are resolved eventually, the first level of support is not as good as we would like. Getting assistance from skilled support takes time."

More SAP HANA cons

"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly. I probably need more information or knowledge. In other database solutions, you can easily optimize all partitions. I haven't found a quicker way to do that in Spark SQL. It would be good if you don't need a partition here, and the system automatically partitions in the best way. They can also provide more educational resources for new users."

"It would be beneficial for aggregate functions to include a code block or toolbox that explains its calculations or supported conditional statements."

"It takes a bit of time to get used to using this solution versus Pandas as it has a steep learning curve."

"The solution needs to include graphing capabilities. Including financial charts would help improve everything overall."

"In the next update, we'd like to see better performance for small points of data. It is possible but there are better tools that are faster and cheaper."

"This solution could be improved by adding monitoring and integration for the EMR."

"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."

"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."

More Spark SQL cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost for SAP HANA is approximately $200 per user per month."

"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."

"SAP HANA is an expensive product."

"The price is on the expensive side, at eight out of ten, with ten being expensive."

"Price-wise, the product falls on the higher side of the spectrum. There is no need to pay for maintenance and support additionally. Support is available for bug fixes in the product."

"The tool is expensive compared to other products, like Oracle R or Microsoft, but it offers a range of all the company's functions."

"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."

"The licensing could improve."

More SAP HANA pricing and cost advice

"We use the open-source version, so we do not have direct support from Apache."

"The solution is bundled with Palantir Foundry at no extra charge."

"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."

"The solution is open-sourced and free."

"There is no license or subscription for this solution."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

University

14%

Retailer

12%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	62

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	4

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...

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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...

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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...

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What needs improvement with Spark SQL?

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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. ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Oracle Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 31% of the time

SQL Server vs SAP HANA

Compared 12% of the time

MySQL vs SAP HANA

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Db2 Database vs SAP HANA

Compared 5% of the time

DuckDB vs SAP HANA

Compared 4% of the time

More SAP HANA Competitors

Apache Spark vs Spark SQL

Compared 26% of the time

IBM Db2 Big SQL vs Spark SQL

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon EMR vs Spark SQL

Compared 15% of the time

HPE Data Fabric vs Spark SQL

Compared 12% of the time

IBM Analytics Engine vs Spark SQL

Compared 8% of the time

More Spark SQL Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SAP HANA

February 2026

Download SAP HANA product report

Buyer's Guide

Spark SQL

February 2026

Download Spark SQL product report

Also Known As

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance, HANA

No data available

Overview

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.

SAP

Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. Unlike the basic Spark RDD API, the interfaces provided by Spark SQL provide Spark with more information about the structure of both the data and the computation being performed. There are several ways to interact with Spark SQL including SQL and the Dataset API. When computing a result the same execution engine is used, independent of which API/language you are using to express the computation. This unification means that developers can easily switch back and forth between different APIs based on which provides the most natural way to express a given transformation.

Apache

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

Buyer's Guide

SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL

March 2026

Free Report: SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL

Find out what your peers are saying about SAP HANA vs. Spark SQL and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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