Elasticsearch vs. SAP HANA Cloud

Elasticsearch is really well suited for searching text (Natural Language Processing) and you can fine tune the searches and scoring very well. I like the ability to find Significant Terms in the Index, where you can find aggregations that are really relevant to a specific search. It also allows for queries to lead to new queries via aggregations which is great for navigating your data. It is less suited to doing more complex aggregations where slices of data are required to be processing using guassian normalizations. And doing searches which join different documents is very very hard, and requires serious thought on how to denormalize data.

Incentivized

SAP HANA Cloud works effectively with SMBs or small to medium-sized enterprises and requires an affordable, scalable ERP system. Companies that must implement SAP S/4 HANA as soon as possible. Companies looking to take advantage of the newest innovation from SAP are looking to cut expenses on their IT infrastructure. SAP HANA CLOUD is not suitable for 1. Large companies with intricate operational procedures. 2. Companies with stringent policies regarding data residency. 3. Businesses with a sizable SAP landscape on premises 4. Companies must closely integrate SAP HANA CLOUD with non-SAP systems.

• Super-fast search on millions of documents. We've got over 2 billion documents in our index and the retrieve speeds are still in the < 1-second range.
• Analytics on top of your search. If you organize your data appropriately, Elasticsearch can serve as a distributed OLAP system
• Elasticsearch is great for geographic data as well, including searching and filtering with geojson, and a variety of geospatial algorithms.

Incentivized

• SAP HANA Cloud can help drive data analytics, data migration, and data management exceptionally well.
• It offers an integration service that lets you integrate data and processes with 3rd party app or any other cloud app.
• In-memory capability helps in faster data processing.

Incentivized

• Setting Java memory thresholds can be a pain for those not accustomed to things like Eden Space & Old Generation which can lead to over allocation, or more likely, under allocation. Apache Solr had a similar issue. It would be nice if the program would take an extra step and dogfood it's own advice by analyzing the system & processes to return a solid recommendation for that configuration. The proper configuration information is outlined in the documentation, it would be nice if that was automated.
• The only health check that ElasticSearch reports back is a "red" status without any real solid information about what is going on, though its usually memory thresholds or disk I/O. I am currently on ElasticSearch 1.5 so that may have changed for newer versions. When the status goes "red", I as the administrator of the software, feel like I lose control of whats going on which should rarely happen. Something more verbose would eliminate that.
• This is more of a critique of the ElasticStack in general. The whole top to bottom stack is starting to get feature creep with things that are better suited in other software and increasing the barrier for entry for people to get started with setting up a robust logging infrastructure. ElasticSearch as a storage search engine, is pretty streamlined, but I can see that the tools that comprise the ELK Stack are going to require a certification with constant study at some point. During major release for Logstash a while back, it literally took a month to learn a new language because Elastic completely changed the syntax. For a medium sized organization of only a couple of admins, that is a pretty high bar where time is money. They really should work on refining/automating the tools & search engine they have, instead of shoehorning/changing things on to an already rock solid foundation.

Incentivized

• Requires higher processing power, otherwise it won't fly. How ever computing costs are lower. Incase you are migrating to cloud please do not select the highest config available in that series . Upgrading it later against a reserved instance can cost you dearly with a series change
• Lack of clarity on licensing is one major challenge
• Unless S/4 with additional features are enabled mere migration HANA DB is not a rewarding journey. Power is in S/4

Incentivized

We're pretty heavily invested in ElasticSearch at this point, and there aren't any obvious negatives that would make us reconsider this decision.

Incentivized

At this moment we are not focusing on SAP, however would love to in the future. This is primarily because of our limited ability to generate more revenue to fund for SAP partnerships and products. Our initial tryst with SAP Partneredge open ecosystem didn't go as planned and we have shelved that for now. Hope we can revive in the future

Incentivized

To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.

Incentivized

SAP HANA Cloud requires significant expertise on technical side to admin and manage it.It surely is lot of improvement over previous versions of SAPThe modern, role-based SAP Fiori interface has enhanced the user experience for applications like S/4HANA, though the complexity of the underlying database remains. For the average business user, the usability of SAP solutions running on the HANA database has seen a major transformation, largely thanks to the Fiori user interface.

Incentivized

We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.

Incentivized

One specific example of how the support for SAP HANA Cloud impacted us is in our efforts to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues. Whenever we encountered an issue or had a question, the support team was quick to respond and provided us with clear and actionable guidance. This helped us avoid downtime and keep our analytics operations running smoothly.

Incentivized

Do not mix data and master roles. Dedicate at least 3 nodes just for Master

Incentivized

Professional GIS people are some of the most risk-averse there are, and it's difficult to get them to move to HANA in one step. Start with small projects building to 80% use of HANA spatial over time.

Incentivized

Elasticsearch is the most well-known and supported free data platform that we identified. We are taking advantage of community knowledge and practices. In terms of flexibility and breadth of use cases no other competitor came close to Elasticsearch. We've tried Solr in the past be we encountered issues which were deal-breaking for us. MongoDB - it just did not pass our evaluation parameters as a main data platform. We still use it for smaller purposes, though.

Incentivized

It enables preview and better cloud service than other cloud platforms. Easy document transfer and faster document transfer are the key points for the selection of the HANA cloud server. The preview of data before its execution is also one of the factors in the selection of the HANA server.

Incentivized

Limitation of training deliverable by organization

Incentivized

• I am not in finance and I suspect even if I was this would be hard to measure. But for sure, Elasticsearch has enabled us to have the most flexible data model in the industry for our customer's data, and in doing so we have attracted many many technical customers and got much of their $$$.
• One problem with Elasticsearch is that because it runs on the JVM, there can be some stop-the-world JVM garbage collections happening that can take down nodes and reduce indexing speed. The solution for that tends to be "let's just upgrade the CPU on that machine". And before you know it you are paying $$$ because this'll happen with 40+ machines.
• On the other hand, I do think that ES is more efficient than other systems and so it requires fewer nodes to keep it highly tolerant and available, so we probably saved some money that way.

Incentivized

• perception that it is "expensive" - this is a messaging issue, not a real issue
• perception that it only runs ERP - SAP is a victim of it's own success in this regard
• perception that it isn't an industrial strength DBMS when, in fact, it is

Incentivized