I've used SAP HANA for about 5 months earlier in the year. Between the overselling marketing, the expensive cost of the thing, and the bugs + growing view that SAP are using customers as guinea pigs; I'd say it's like IBM Watson for data.

You can get good performance out of it, no medals there as any IMDB would give you that.

My pain points were:

- it is sold as the virtualisation layer to rule them all, until you find crazy breakages. SAP's SQL dialect is case sensitive. That'll frustrate a lot of downstream databases that you deal with, or the users thereof.

- virtual warehouse. I'm not a Kimball expert, but our resident experts came to the same conclusion as I did, that you can't really build useful VIRTUAL data marts directly from disparate downstream data sources without persisting that somewhere. That then defeats the purpose, in my quasi-professional opinion.

- I spent over a month looking at the SDA/SDI to "Big Data" parts. Very immature, found interesting instances where push-down of predicates were inconsistent and poor. It's one thing to say you've got Apache Spark integration, but it's another thing when your system can't figure out that data comes from the same system, and this you could do some expensive computations downstream instead of saturating the network pulling a lot of data. I did my work early this year, so I would expect improvement here. The problem though was that many of us started feeling like SAP are releasing a product that should spend more time in development before coming to us. I'm entitled to say so because they charge an arm and a leg.

- data modelling/development. SQL is Turing complete, but some things are still hard to do in it. Instead of giving us more capabilities when modelling our data, they're getting "distracted" by wanting to tuck marketing boxes like R support, NodeJS support, etc. I didn't spend enough time on those to feel comfortable with producing a fair opinion, so I'll reserve one.

- SDLC, security. SAP has solid products there, and I learnt quite a lot around security integration. There were some quirks, but those were largely because of our requirements, not SAP. I enjoyed working on data access and security patterns.

- IDE. They initially used a modified NetBeans, which was also available as a plugin. I'm not a NB person, but this was solid. They decided to move to a web-based IDE. I don't know why, but they deprecated certain things while their web thingy was not even feature complete. It was a growing mess when you'd find that you can only do something in X but not Y.

To recap, a high cost for performance that you could get from a competitor, or even a well baby-sat Apache Ignite cluster (for the features they support, at least they aren't lying in their marketing). I think of it as a lame caching layer, that's useful if you're already invested in the SAP ecosystem, think of SAP CRMs or even their warehousing as a stretch.

So, no; it's not revolutionary in my view. The "specialised hardware" is marketing bait, our IT (I too was) were convinced that one could build themselves the same hardware as was speced. When I first heard of the special hardware thing, I thought of a custom Intel with features that only SAP would have, DDR4 RAM at crazy clock speed, etc. Only to find that it's a sly way of controlling how much they charge you. "Want to add moar RAMs? Pay us so you don't vid warranty, and we'll charge you more of course for the extra RAM".

To conclude my rant, I hope you've found my view useful. My conclusion when I rolled off from my SAP HANA (notice how little I've used this acronym, I despise it) project feeling like it was making everyone in the room bad. People were forsaking their Oracle DBs and Hadoop clusters to make design compromises for an over-marketed database thingy.