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SAP HANA

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SAP HANA vs Snowflake: What are the differences?

Introduction

SAP HANA and Snowflake are both popular data warehousing solutions that offer various features and capabilities. However, there are key differences between these two platforms.

  1. Scalability: SAP HANA is a columnar, in-memory database that is highly scalable and can handle a large volume of data. It allows for vertical scalability by adding more resources to a single server. On the other hand, Snowflake is a cloud data platform that provides virtually unlimited scalability through a separation of compute and storage. This allows for horizontal scalability by adding or removing compute resources as needed.

  2. Architecture: SAP HANA is an on-premises or private cloud solution that requires hardware and infrastructure setup. It integrates databases, data processing, and application platforms into a single system. In contrast, Snowflake is a fully managed cloud service that eliminates the need for setting up and managing infrastructure. It is built on a multi-cluster, shared data architecture that separates storage and compute layers.

  3. Concurrency: SAP HANA allows for high concurrency and supports parallel processing, enabling multiple users to access and work with the data simultaneously. It utilizes multi-core parallel processing and in-memory computing to achieve high performance. Snowflake, on the other hand, has a completely different approach to concurrency. It uses micro-partitioning and automatic query optimization to achieve concurrent, high-performance data access. Snowflake's unique architecture allows for seamless scalability and optimization of query execution.

  4. Data Sharing: SAP HANA offers data sharing capabilities within its own ecosystem, allowing users to share data between different SAP HANA instances or environments. This enables collaboration and easy access to shared data. In contrast, Snowflake is designed for sharing data seamlessly across multiple organizations and ecosystems. It provides a secure and controlled way to share data with external parties using secure data sharing.

  5. Pricing Model: SAP HANA follows a traditional licensing model where users have to pay for licenses based on the number of users or cores. Additional costs may be incurred for hardware and infrastructure setup. On the other hand, Snowflake follows a consumption-based pricing model, where users pay for the amount of data processed and the resources utilized. This allows for cost optimization and flexibility in usage.

  6. Data Governance: SAP HANA provides robust data governance capabilities, including data classification, data lineage, and access control. It allows for fine-grained access control and auditing of data. Snowflake also provides comprehensive data governance features, including access controls, encryption, and auditing. It enables organizations to enforce data security and compliance requirements effectively.

In summary, SAP HANA is an in-memory, scalable database system that requires infrastructure setup and provides data sharing within its ecosystem. Snowflake is a fully managed, cloud-based data platform that offers virtually unlimited scalability, automatic query optimization, and seamless data sharing across ecosystems. The two platforms differ in terms of architecture, scalability, concurrency, pricing model, and data governance capabilities.

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Pros of SAP HANA
Pros of Snowflake
  • 5
    In-memory
  • 5
    SQL
  • 4
    Distributed
  • 4
    Performance
  • 2
    Realtime
  • 2
    Concurrent
  • 2
    OLAP
  • 2
    OLTP
  • 1
    JSON
  • 7
    Public and Private Data Sharing
  • 4
    Multicloud
  • 4
    Good Performance
  • 4
    User Friendly
  • 3
    Great Documentation
  • 2
    Serverless
  • 1
    Economical
  • 1
    Usage based billing
  • 1
    Innovative

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What is SAP HANA?

It is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows it to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk.

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake eliminates the administration and management demands of traditional data warehouses and big data platforms. Snowflake is a true data warehouse as a service running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—no infrastructure to manage and no knobs to turn.

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Jobs that mention SAP HANA and Snowflake as a desired skillset
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Oakland, California, United States
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Jul 2 2019 at 9:34PM

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What are some alternatives to SAP HANA and Snowflake?
Oracle
Oracle Database is an RDBMS. An RDBMS that implements object-oriented features such as user-defined types, inheritance, and polymorphism is called an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). Oracle Database has extended the relational model to an object-relational model, making it possible to store complex business models in a relational database.
Hadoop
The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
Hazelcast
With its various distributed data structures, distributed caching capabilities, elastic nature, memcache support, integration with Spring and Hibernate and more importantly with so many happy users, Hazelcast is feature-rich, enterprise-ready and developer-friendly in-memory data grid solution.
Aerospike
Aerospike is an open-source, modern database built from the ground up to push the limits of flash storage, processors and networks. It was designed to operate with predictable low latency at high throughput with uncompromising reliability – both high availability and ACID guarantees.
See all alternatives