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SAP HANA vs Spark SQL comparison

 

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) (4th)
Spark SQL
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Hadoop (5th)
 

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

"Some functions have good performance."
"The most valuable SAP HANA features are that, compared to Oracle, there is less administrative work and less complex work to handle, making it very straightforward."
"The solution is easy to scale."
"SAP is great for what it does."
"SAP HANA should cover all and automate your business processes without needing a lot of customizations."
"The functionality is of the solution is very good."
"The most valuable feature of SAP HANA is the modeling of the databases."
"The solution is very good and has covered all functional areas needed in this type of solution."
"The solution is easy to understand if you have basic knowledge of SQL commands."
"I find the Thrift connection valuable."
"The speed of getting data, as our TBs are big and it's a lot of data."
"One of Spark SQL's most beautiful features is running parallel queries to go through enormous data."
"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."
"This solution is useful to leverage within a distributed ecosystem."
"Certain data sets that are very large are very difficult to process with Pandas and Python libraries. Spark SQL has helped us a lot with that."
 

Cons

"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)."
"Some production features are lacking. For example, we cannot see any dashboards in the production department."
"The surface side or Attack dashboard needs improvement because there are some gaps after sales services."
"In a future release, SAP HANA should add a module for taxation, such as income tax and withholding tax."
"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."
"The documentation can be improved in the future."
"More standards would help in the future."
"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."
"It would be useful if Spark SQL integrated with some data visualization tools."
"Being a new user, I am not able to find out how to partition it correctly."
"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."
"Anything to improve the GUI would be helpful."
"In terms of improvement, the only thing that could be enhanced is the stability aspect of Spark SQL."
"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."
"Spark SQL consumes so many resources that we migrated our streaming job from Spark to Apache Flink."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SAP HANA is very expensive for small to medium businesses."
"SAP HANA is very expensive here in China. My company bought the SAP ERP suite, which includes SAP HANA. For others who use SAP HANA as an analytical database, CPU numbers will affect the pricing, so as a solution, it's costly."
"The price of SAP HANA is very expensive and it is paid annually."
"The tool’s subscription is yearly."
"There is an annual payment needed to use the solution."
"Setup and licensing require planning and proper budgeting, as it is not cheap."
"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."
"There is an annual license to use SAP HANA."
"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."
"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."
"There is no license or subscription for this solution."
"The solution is open-sourced and free."
"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%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
University
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.