Hi Orest,
as SAP HANA studio is using JDBC I'd tend to say there are already quite a lot of people that worked with JDBC on HANA:
Concerning batching: it's supported, but this doesn't mean that you can UPDATE two tables with one command.
However you can use .addBatch() to insert/update/delete batches of selections with one command execution.
For the second point: drilling down the total run time of a specific command to the used interface API by comparing it to a system low level tool like ping is a bit far off, don't you think?
- Lars