Teenage Hana

This is the second part of a review of the SAP Hana database. In the first part (here), the focus was on the views SAP customers had on SAP making Hana mandatory, which will now force customers to pay double the amount in licensing fees. In the future, many ERP users will have to pay for licenses and maintenance for AnyDB (Oracle, Microsoft or IBM) as well as for Hana.

Denial of reality and repair service

Many years ago, I got into a heated debate with Christian Klein about Hana and the quality of this database. As in any civilized and fair discourse, both sides were right: Christian Klein claimed that he had heard only good things about Hana from his customers. I countered that the SAP Basis team no longer had an overview of the numerous Hana fixes and updates that were released weekly by SAP.Updates that were played out weekly by SAP.

Why were we both right? Of course, Christian Klein spoke to the executives of his customers, who were far removed from the basic IT department and rarely heard the complaints of the SAP team from the data center. Because I studied computer science, I am in contact with SAP technicians and Basis employees from the Customer Competence Center. The voices from the data centers are very different to those from top management.

Hana still suffers from data inconsistency with versions SPS-6 Revision 60, 61 and 62—SAP also warns about this in the corresponding SAP Notes. Admittedly, this is very technical and neither Professor Hasso Plattner nor SAP CEO Christian Klein speak at this level—however, it is still relevant!

Hana, too young for this world

For a complex ERP system such as R/3, ECC 6.0, or S/4, developing an agile, stable, and functional database is no small task. Some members of the SAP community may remember the Microsoft disaster with the SQL Server version 7 database. At the time, people were working day and night in Walldorf (SAP) and Seattle (Microsoft) because the database had massive bugs and threatened SAP customers’ business.

Microsoft SQL Server has now reached a level of maturity that allows this database to be used in high availability scenarios. However, this maturity was not achieved overnight, and Hana is far too young to match the quality of Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. It will get there one day, but it will take time, and until then, repairing is the order of the day.

SAP Hana engineer jumped ship

Perhaps the strangest anecdote in the short history of Hana since 2011 is the surprise departure of SAP Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka in 2014. Sikka was the second "foster son of Hasso Plattner" on SAP's executive board, after SAP Chief Technology Officer Shai Agassi. Both Sikka and Agassi wanted to become SAP CEOs.

However, the real reasons for Vishal Sikka's departure are still unclear. Many insiders suspect that the final positioning of Hana had something to do with it. In an interview with WiWo editor Michael Kroker, Professor Hasso Plattner formulated the goal as follows: "The last project I drove forward technologically at SAP was the Hana high-performance database. I hoped that SAP would succeed in bringing Hana to the top of this category because it was by far the best database at the time. The market should have rewarded that somehow, but SAP didn't quite manage it.”

Apparently, Vishal Sikka wanted to release a public domain version of Hana to position the database in non-SAP areas. Whether Hasso Plattner or the SAP management opposed this remains unknown. The fact is, however, that if SAP had marketed its own database in a similar way to that of the underlying Linux operating system, it would have missed out on millions of dollars in licensing revenue.

Hana is a commercial success

Even if Hana has so far failed to excite many computer scientists and has driven many SAP customer’s CFOs to despair over the double DB license fees, it has been a resounding commercial and strategic success for SAP itself. Now SAP no longer has to share the ERP community with Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The entire ERP stack is in the hands of SAP. The final vendor lock-in has reached its crowning conclusion with Hana and S/4.