vermorel Aug 23, 2022 | flag

Shaun Snapp (principal at Brightwork Research) delivers an analysis that matches my own empirical observations about HANA, an analytics platform sold by SAP. The in-memory paradigm is expensive, pretty-much by design, due to both CAPEX and OPEX costs associated with the ownership of terabytes of DRAM, the class of devices that hold the memory in modern servers. Among the in-memory options for enterprise analytics, HANA appears to be one of the worst offenders of the market in terms of costs. Unfortunately, it does not appear to deliver features that can't be replicated in much cheaper systems. Nowadays, PostgreSQL, with a proper columnar setup, is a superior alternative in every dimension that I can think of.