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0 pointsjiggawatts3y ago0 comments

SAP targets ERP, and basically nothing else. You will never[1] see SAP HANA used outside of a SAP deployment, even though it is a general purpose in-memory database with some nice features. Similarly, you never see SAP ABAP used outside of a SAP deployment.

Microsoft targets the most generic use-cases possible, even more so than, say, Linux. You can do anything[2] with Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Azure, etc...

[1] For some values of never. [2] For some values of anything.

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taway199207063y ago

It's an interesting observation. SAP has opened up some of their offerings (like OpenUI5) but there's been very little buy-in. Perhaps it's also partly due to the earlier comments from then-SAP CTO Shai Agassi claiming that open source stimulates innovation? Maybe it's because the products aren't great (I'm no fan of UI5).

FWIW, I'm a massive HANA skeptic - I think it's overpriced and SAP betting the farm on it a few years ago wasn't necessarily the best option. It's a product that was put together from various disparate components - TREX, P*TIME (from Transact in Memory), etc - and that shows. It hangs together like something made of brown paper and string, with so many tuneables it puts Oracle to shame.

Nihilartikel3y ago

I have 'one' exception to that. I worked with a medical data analysis company that had implemented SAP HANA as a data warehouse/analysis platform for tons of treatment records.

My task was replacing it with Spark/S3 :P

taway199207063y ago

My current workplace has implemented a custom SAP HANA-based solution for forecasting (code is written in a mixture of Python and R). I wasn't involved in the project but I'm not convinced it couldn't have been architected completely differently - perhaps a suite of microservices running on K8S with a PostgreSQL backend. Having an in-memory database licensed by RAM usage quickly gets mother-f'ing expensive as Nathan Fielder would say.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsjiggawatts3y ago0 comments

Microsoft targets the most generic use-cases possible, even more so than, say, Linux. You can do anything[2] with Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Azure, etc...

[1] For some values of never. [2] For some values of anything.

0 comments

taway199207063y ago

Nihilartikel3y ago

I have 'one' exception to that. I worked with a medical data analysis company that had implemented SAP HANA as a data warehouse/analysis platform for tons of treatment records.

My task was replacing it with Spark/S3 :P

taway199207063y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse