Successful companies in the so called data-driven economy must analyze large amounts of data and extract value from it. Performance, cost, speed, and flexibility of the analytical platforms are crucial elements in achieving business success in this process. Many companies are using modern ERP systems such as SAP and are also performing analytics within. To optimize analytical processes, and reduce costs and complexity, they also need to consider alternative approaches, solutions, and technologies. EXASOL analytical database solution has excellent performance results in 3 following areas: in-memory capabilities, infrastructure & performance, and database management.
In-memory capabilities
- With EXASOL, you can run faster queries using less memory and computing resources that can be freed up for other tasks. How? Typically, in EXASOL only a fraction of entire data volumes need processing when running analytic queries. By implementing intelligent algorithms EXASOL understands the difference between hot and cold data sets. It knows how to only keep hot-data in-memory. An EXASOL database requires keeping only 10% – 30% of your data in memory. On the other side SAP HANA database typically requires all data volumes to reside in memory, although the company isn’t actively using large parts of it.
INFRASTRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE
- EXASOL was designed from day one as a Massively Parallel Processing solution. Therefore, EXASOL runs on any number of standard off-the-shelf commodity servers. They are robust, cheap, and easy to upgrade or replace. Most SAP HANA systems are non-clustered single-node solutions or they are using proprietary systems. In both cases, hardware can be very expensive.
- Users can face a level of complexity that they are unfamiliar with when running SAP HANA. They need to manage, configure and adjust two database engines a column-based database and a column-based engine. They also must support OLTP use cases, analytic workloads as well as other jobs simultaneously. Managing SAP HANA database is more complex, time-consuming, difficult to configure, hard to scale up or down, and requires skilled and experienced DBAs.
Infrastructure and performance
- EXASOL is different from SAP HANA. The database is self-tuning and there are hardly any configuration options that a DBA needs to look at. That means consultants or skilled specialists are able to focus more on analytics tasks as such and are not occupied with administration tasks. EXASOL cluster is designed up of nodes that are created and performed equally. They are more robust and powerful due to their simplicity and efficiency and therefore EXASOL provides better scalability for much less money.
Considering the above arguments EXASOL’s self-optimizing database provides similar functionalities, easier management, excellent performance, and an extremely low TCO. In fact, in many POCs, users appreciate how their EXASOL is up and running in a fraction of the time and how EXASOL performs much faster on smaller-sized hardware with less memory than SAP HANA cluster. In other words, EXASOL users tell us: “It just works.”