Oracle Exadata vs SAP HANA

Before I left on vacation (now almost a month ago – can’t remember when I had such a long vacation if I ever had), Mark Fontecchio organized a short video conference between myself and John Appleby. The idea was to compare Oracle Exadata with SAP HANA in a shot video discussion. Unfortunately, video part didn’t really work but we did end up with at least a podcast — thanks Mark for organizing it.



Download MP3 — Oracle Exadata vs. SAP HANA

I must say I don’t have any significant knowledge about SAP HANA so my conclusions are based on SAP HANA public materials, architecture overviews, marketing info and my vision of current use cases and trends in data processing and storage space. To my surprise, John and I seemed to agree that HANA and Exadata are currently solving different business problems and you can’t really say they are competing. However, based on SAP direction, they intend to make HANA competing with traditional relational database systems used for SAP products including Exadata. This does seem to me to be couple years away, though.

My limited perspective tells me that momentum for real-time analytics on Big Data has just started to pick up and by the time it’s in-demand en-mass, Oracle would have an integrates solution so customers relying on Oracle software would naturally gravitate to Oracle. John’s argument is that customers could just as well gravitate to their application vendor instead and those using SAP application products would tend to look to SAP HANA more. We both might be right in the end.