Deep Dive Into SAP HANA

[Former Member]

This blog is written to have a basic understanding about SAP HANA.  How this new technology will support real-time reporting on massive amount of data is something that I wanted to share,,,!!

Basically HANA stands for High Performance Analytic Appliance, which means a combination of Hardware and Software that give users to have a real time data analysis in no time.  It integrates a number of SAP Components (like.HANA DB, Modeler, Data services etc.) delivered as an optimized hardware appliance in conjunction with leading hardware partners. We can say its a new Hardware Innovation which is a sum of Multicore CPUs, Multi CPU Boards and Multi Server Boards with Massive Memory setups....is this enough :???: so what else apart of new Innovation in Hardware SAP HANA is able to manage huge amount of data...the answer is -- It has

- Columnar data Storage which is Optimized and easily compressable and this is completely different from our classical approach.

- Partitioning-which spread table contents across blades and work on smaller sets of data in parallel, and

- Calculations are moved to database layer.

So the cohesion of these changes resulted into a faster data experience. Lets see what SAP HANA 1.0 is all about:

SAP HANA 1.0

-This is basically an In-Memory Computing Engine with SQL and MDX interfaces, calculation engine etc...

-and SAP HANA Studio which is used for Administration and Modeling.

The SAP HANA 1.0 hosts an application tool called SAP HANA studio which incoorporates the data modeling function within Information Modeler perspective. When we start SAP HANA studio for the first time we can decide on several perspectives. Perspectives are pre-defined UI-layouts for several application issues. There are three perspectives or views, Administration Console, Documentation Overview and Information modeler.  The Information Modeler perspective is used by BI architects/developers to create Attribute Views, Analytical Views and Calculation Views. 

From BI perspective they appear as:

Attribute View---------------->Master Data

Analytical View--------------> Infocube

Calculation View------------> Multiprovider.

So, once your Modeling of views are over, you can access your data on various client tools like Microsoft Excel, SAP Business Objects Explorer, Business Objects Analysis. In upcoming blogs we can discuss how actually we can create Attribute Views, Analytic Views and Calculation Views and about SAP Landscape and Transformation (SLT replication server)...issues etc....hope to see you again. :smile:

Harish.