I am sure most of you have experienced or read or at least heard about the new buzz in the Information Technology world – SAP HANA (SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance). It’s an amazing appliance to work with. Though it’s based on the already existing in-memory technology, the whole idea has been an immediate success with the end-users and developers.
So, what is so great about this whole thing? I will start with some basics.
The Online Transactional Processing system (OLTP) was designed to handle the more complex Business requirements and the Online Analytical Processing system was designed to handle the analytical & financial planning applications. Both OLTP & OLAP have been based on the relational theory. Data in the OLTP is arranged in rows and the data in OLAP is often organized in the star schemas, where compression of data is a standard practice to improve the query performance.
Traditionally, the data has always been split between the OLTP and the OLAP systems. OLTP system has been a pre-requisite for the OLAP system but it is only with OLAP that the organizations are able to make better decisions as they can compare the actual and the planned data and also use the historical data to understand the trend that the business has followed over the past few years.
A decade of technological improvements:
There have been major developments in the technology space during the last decade, but a couple of things that stood out are – the advent of the modern multi-core CPUs (which are capable of providing an enormous amount of computing power) and the growth of main memory.
More recently the use of column store databases for analytics has become quite popular and has shown significant improvements in query processing. This ensured that reporting on the OLAP system is even faster. And now, the thought of having a column store database for the OLTP data has become a reality. This has also resulted in massive data compression ratios (a minimum of 2.5 times) – I have seen compression ratios of up to 10 times! (All this without actually performing compression)
The idea has given us BWA & Explorer and now the appliance known as SAP HANA.
What is/ are the functions of SAP HANA?
What does SAP HANA use?
Advantage(s) of using SAP HANA?
Coming from an SAP BW background, I was more interested & thrilled with the idea of SAP BW on HANA. I have penned down my thoughts here.
Insight on SAP BW 7.30 on HANA
SAP has brought out SAP HANA 1.0 SPS03 which is capable of supporting BW 7.30 (which should be on SPS05 at the minimum), i.e. SAP HANA will act as a pure database below BW application layer. Another pre-requisite is a standard database migration from the existing database to a HANA database. Also, the BW system has to be Unicode-enabled.
After the database migration & upgrading to SAP BW 7.30, we can see that there is no real change in the current data-flow or multi-providers or queries – they stay as such. So, we have the existing flow as-is and also take advantage of the in-memory capability of SAP HANA.
Advantage of having SAP BW on HANA:
On the flip side:
So, how does HANA fare against a BWA?
Both HANA and BWA are based on the in-memory technology. Difference being- BWA gives us performance gains only at the query level but with HANA in place, the same happens at the database level. With HANA, the BWA indexes would become obsolete and we will continue to get BWA-like query performance.
Questions???
During various discussions with colleagues and also after going through articles on the internet, a lot of doubts arise. Many things still remain unclear to me and i believe to many others as well. Although I have written about my understanding on SAP HANA and SAP BW on HANA, the real motive here is to highlight/ bring out some of the general doubts and my thoughts on those.
There are many questions which I am unable to get an answer at this point, but I will open it for the community and hope that someone can throw some light on these and enlighten us:
References that have helped me put up this blog:
http://www.sigmod09.org/images/sigmod1ktp-plattner.pdf
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/t/135
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