Oracle Exalytics and
SAP HANA overlap on a few aspects: both are in-memory databases, both are appliances and both can serve analytic workloads. It’s peculiar how to read the multitude of blogs and forum comments comparing them as their similarity really ends there.
This article tries to shine some light on the confusion that reigns over
what SAP HANA is, so let's start there first.
SAP HANA, is designed to be full transactional relational database management system (
RDBMS). It is
ACID-compliant, which translates to to being fully resilient against hardware failure (it uses save points and logs to save information to disk). Both disaster recovery and fault tolerance are supported. In terms of scalability for large workloads (16 TB of compressed data, 80 TB+ of comparable Oracle) is moderate and last but not least is available as an appliance from the major hardware vendors (Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM and NEC).
SAP HANA is a brand new type of RDBMS. First,
it is fully in-memory. It can support transactional (
OLTP) and multidimensional (
OLAP) workloads. All of its OLAP capabilities are virtual: you don't need to duplicate data or have a separate system for reporting.
As data is stored once, it is also instantly available through other tools, such as SAP Landscape Transformation, Data Services or Event Stream Processing for transactional purposes, and therefore reporting is in real time.
