What is the difference between the Smart Data Access of SAP HANA and SAP HANA Vora?

SAP HANA and Hadoop are two different things in which SAP HANA is an ANSI SQL database which helps in maintaining ACID constraints, and therefore it is found to be good for transactional & analytical applications. It is known for its high performing database which is good for transactional applications. It also allows you to execute complex queries over this high performing database.

Hadoop is referred to as a framework that helps you to store large datasets in a distributed environment, so that you can process the same parallely. The actual power of Hadoop lies in storing data that can be of different varieties, i.e. structured, semi-structured & unstructured data. But Hadoop is not suited for transactional applications.

Coming to SAP HANA VORA, it is referred to as an in-memory query engine which is an extension to Apache Spark execution framework to provide interactive analytics on Hadoop. It provides in-memory processing on top of Hadoop and enterprise functionality to simplify the IT landscape for organisations.

HANA is an in-memory database that primarily focuses on performance, while Hadoop’s power lies in reducing the storage cost. SAP HANA can be used for transactional purposes & Hadoop can be used for storing unstructured data in an efficient manner.