Is that necessary?

Why? The annual maintenance fee for the database is, among other things, a percentage of the list price of the user licenses. No distinction is made as to whether all users actually use this database.

If the ERP users work with Hana and the HR and CRM users with Oracle, the corresponding Oracle and Hana maintenance fee must still be paid for all users.

Each user then has two DB licenses, even if they only need one. This status is represented by the middle bar in the graphic on this page.

What now? There is no quick and easy solution. So SAP designed a combination package consisting of a traditional disk-based SQL database (Sybase ASE) and the in-memory computing database Hana.

Parts of the SAP software stack that have not yet been transferred to Hana and are ready to run can continue to run on the SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (Sybase ASE) database, while Simple Finance (S/4), for example, runs on Hana.

SAP "sweetens" this double DB change with a single, relatively low license price. Ultimately, however, it could prove to be a deceptive package, because every database change entails numerous organizational tasks: system copy, downtime, backup, hardware/storage adaptation and testing, testing, testing...

Is that necessary?

If you believe the words of SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert and Professor Hasso Plattner, then the intermediate step of SAP/Sybase ASE is completely counterproductive.

Both explained at the SAP in-house exhibition Sapphire, which took place in Orlando at the beginning of May, that Hana is also a completely normal SQL database and therefore any SAP software can run on Hana without any problems - perhaps not at optimum speed, but it can run!

The confusion and lack of information regarding Hana does not seem to be decreasing, but rather increasing from time to time: What can Hana really do? Do we need the intermediate step of SAP/Sybase ASE? A plausible answer comes from Fujitsu. But what do Hasso Plattner and Bernd Leukert say?