The plan visualization (PlanViz) would be the tool of choice here as it actually fetches the complete result set.
SAP HANA performance is tremendously affected by the size of the result set - so simply doing a count or just fetching 1000 rows won't give you a realistic answer.
Fernando Ros: the optimizer of most databases is now clever enough to find out if you are just counting and will change the execution accordingly. For SAP HANA this means: we just skip materialization wherever we can - which leads to very different results for the runtime on count(*) and the actual SQL command.
- Lars