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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

I think the usual database for SAP is Oracle. So maybe they get off of Oracle ERP, but could still be stuck with them on the back end.

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Oracle used to be the most popular db for SAP along with SQL Server and DB2. That changed with SAP HANA. These days SAP HANA is the only supported DB for latest and greatest.

When I search for SAP HANA, it says it's a column-oriented in-memory analytical RDBMS; is that outdated info? Where is the actual data stored if this is in-memory?

From what I know, HANA also keeps a copy on disk at all times. The "in-memory" label is valid because a full copy of all database contents is held in memory, and all reads are performed on that copy.

Disclosure: I work at SAP, but neither on HANA nor on any part of the "SAP system". (I'm in the cloud infrastructure unit.)

Not knowing too much about Hana, it seems like they are doing their best to wrap in as much business intelligence as they can as opposed to having their users purchase other services, is this the case? Or do people generally maintain their BI stack after adopting Hana?

Oracle ate a bunch of their market by going after the BI ecosystem at large and using those apps to sneak in their DB. So SAP decided they'd do the same "downstack" and eat some of the Oracle db revenue. Hence the push for HANA.

I know Oracle has some data mining module and decent stats functions in the database engine, but what's their end-user BI offering? Or is it just baked into their ERP offerings, so it's not branded separately?

There is a reason you don't know them - you really don't want to, trust me, don't go looking for trouble. But yes, they do have loads of stuff that is not in the database. 99% of them came from acquisitions and were then smashed together in something resembling a vaguely-coherent ecosystem.

I’m only aware of Hyperion.

https://www.oracle.com/business-analytics/business-intellige...

Yeah, they try to sell SAP Hana were possible :) I think they even prefer that you use SAP products in their SAP Cloud

SAP owns Sybase, HANA is for cloud.

HANA works on-premise as well as in the cloud. If I had to guess, I'd bet that on-premise deployments are still more numerous than cloud deployments (although the share of cloud is growing rapidly).

Disclosure: I work at SAP, though not on HANA.

The last company I was at was switching to HANA when I left, none of it was cloud-based.

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