Business Insider has an interesting interview with Vishal Sikka, the SAP engineer that created the HANA database with his team of developers. In the first six months the HANA database generated $200 million in sales. And the claims in speed and performance are quite outrageous. Check out these quotes from the article/interview:
Given a chance, he’s happy to rattle off the happy customers who have already yanked out their old database and replaced it with HANA. He says that two such customers have become members of the “100,000K club” which means that HANA runs 100,000-times faster than their previous database.
One large Japanese retailer used to need three days to process its customers rewards program. With HANA it now takes three seconds.
“The son of the owner of company runs the IT department. He was so psyched he called me,” Sikka laughs. It actually took them longer — five hours — to calculate and verify the performance improvement numbers than it did to issue its rewards. The company can now offer its customers on-the-spot rewards while shopping in the store, based on the items loaded in the shopping cart.
This is hard to believe, but if it is only partly true, this could mean serious competition for Oracle.