- NYSE:SAP has launched Hana Vora, a query engine product that leverages the increasingly popular Apache Spark framework, and which integrates with SAP's Hana in-memory database.
- Like Hana, Spark is used to analyze large datasets in-memory. However, while Hana is used to analyze structured database entries (such as those produced by SAP's ERP software), Spark is often used to handle unstructured and semi-structured data, including content stored via the Hadoop big data framework. Both Spark and Hadoop are open-source.
- Though some overlap exists, SAP insists Hana and Spark are complementary. The company argues Vora's querying tools and Hana integration enable richer analytics for Spark, thereby making it valuable for applications (fraud detection, network traffic analysis, etc.) where understanding business process context for giant datasets is important.