ASUG Virginia SAP HANA for Developers Workshop (Part 1) Recap

[TammyPowlas]

With thanks to the ASUG Virginia Chapter volunteers, particularly Keith Seckman, rich.heilmanthomas.jung and sponsor DataXstream we just finished a two day hands-on workshop "SAP HANA Developers".  While I am not a developer, I learned a great deal, with some of my usual notes below.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

All new development will be on ABAP for Eclipse, not SE80

What need to do on your code to run on HANA

With BW on HANA you don’t have so much custom development to leverage HANA

You can have new applications; it is fast, in memory, column store, no indexes

Thomas said it was more than a fast database

It also has text analysis, spatial, predictive analytics

HANA native allows you to run directly out of database itself

Workshop – new apps and business suite

Figure 2: Source: SAP

With on premise you can do custom development with ABAP or HANA native

Speed development – ABAP or HANA native

2 different – private managed cloud HEC or HANA Enterprise Cloud where you are paying someone to manage hardware and software for you.

You can’t do Java custom development in HEC – only ABAP and HANA native

With the public cloud  you can run on another database; the infrastructure is multi-tenant environment – no ABAP development

Figure 3: Source: SAP

Figure 3 shows that SAP HANA is a "complete relational database" Join, in memory columnar – same relational SQL

Migration is a technical part for BASIS using the DBTOOl, unload, reload, need to do an upgrade to 740 (plus Unicode)

Performance is where you spend time as your company expects better performance – if report SELECT * FROM VBAP for each record in header table – HANA can speed up a little more

“Do things to let HANA help you” – use WHERE conditions

Code pushdown – put as much of the processing in database – not do so much inside internal tables

"Write better ABAP code" was the statement made during the workshop.

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Figure 4 shows "What happens during migration"

Figure 5: Source: SAP

SAP owns database and ABAP kernel so it can optimize things to interface better

FDA "fast data access" to transfer data more efficiently

Rule is still the same, minimize transfer

Instead of a million select single, use an INNERJOIN and let database do the work

Minimize search overhead – no secondary indices with HANA any more

Store data as columns and not as rows

Put work into HANA to see benefit

Figure 6: Source: SAP

Figure 6 shows pushing the code to database to take advantage of database

You shrink the app server

Let database take the load

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More to come as I have time.

One of the final exercises was creating a Fiori launchpad - success!  The other nice part is we could download our work and then use it on a SAP CAL/Amazon instance.

The next ASUG Virginia Chapter meeting is October 3rd - I believe in Williamsburg, Virginia, co-located with a golf outing.

Also see Rich's sessions at SAP TechEd && d-code and Thomas Jung's sessions