How Accurate Was SAP on In Memory Computing?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • For years SAP has stated that on HANA and in-memory computing.
  • In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim. 

What SAP Said About SAP on In-Memory Computing

When SAP introduced, HANA has continuously claimed that HANA was utterly different than what had come before it. It claimed that a primary reason for this was that HANA was “in memory.” This led to other vendors copying SAP’s marketing as SAP convinced many customers that databases should be running entirely in memory, even though HANA never ran entirely in memory but simply had a large memory hardware footprint. You will learn how accurate SAP was in their claims around in-memory databases.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

The Truth About In-Memory Computing?

As we covered in the article How to Understand Why In-Memory Computing is a Myth,

“Calling HANA “in-memory computing” is the same as saying “bullet based shooting,” when discussing firearms.”

All computing is in memory; no form of computing is performed without memory because the results would be unacceptable. On this computer being used to type this sentence, the program has been loaded into memory. HANA is differentiated from other databases in that it loads more of the tables into memory, but it does not load all of the tables. Secondly, no performance benefit has been demonstrated from HANA by following this approach over competing database offerings.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for the use of the term in-memory computing.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.