Oracle Exalytics vs SAP Hana

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. 

On the other hand Oracle Exalytics is a smart box. It is a good supplement to existing Oracle RDBMS and Oracle Exadata database machine. It is a collection of useful technologies on the same packed hardware including the TimesTen in-memory database, Essbase OLAP engine and Oracle BI Foundation front-end tools. Together make Exalytics a self-standing package able to offer light speed reporting via state of the art Oracle BI solutions.

 

The “smartness” comes also from the fact that it is able to automatically suggest parts of the Oracle database to replicate into its "smart cache," which is basically an aggregation engine. Then your BI queries will run against either Exalytics or Oracle.

Due to the incredible performance of these machines, Oracle is actually making use of the tremendous buffer left over by adding more and more applications to run and work simultaneously together.

 

In conclusion a straight forward comparison of the two is simply not interesting nor possible as they do overlap somehow in final usage however they are products which are considerably different in terms of hardware, software and costs.