The real power of SAP HANA unfolds only with optimized applications

[architectSAP]

Have you been wondering whether you should migrate your SAP ERP system onto SAP HANA to benefit from pure in-memory processing?

In fact, while writing and retrieving data from memory rather than from hard disk is by an order of magnitude faster, this potential has already been mostly taken advantage of by clever caching strategies of modern database management systems.

The real power of SAP HANA therefore only unfolds with applications that make use of its column store and analytical capabilities. A nice tutorial that shows this effect can be found here. We augmented this scenario slightly to run the SAP HANA analytical view and the ABAP on HANA query in parallel to compare their runtimes:

While the SAP HANA analytical view retrieves the list of all open invoices, including the average number of days the invoices of a customer are open, the sum of the amount of these open invoices (including currency conversion) and a flag set by customization values to identify critical customers, in about 9 seconds:

a very similar ABAP on HANA query continues for nearly 2 more minutes:

Fortunately these SAP HANA optimized applications exist in the form of the next wave of SAP Fiori applications called: SAP Fiori for SAP Business Suite 7 Innovations 2013.

Therefore you would in fact have to move your SAP ERP system onto SAP HANA, if you wanted to benefit from these SAP HANA optimized applications, because that is an architectural precondition both for the SAP Fiori Facts Sheets as well as for the SAP Fiori Analytical Apps:

To summarize:

• Just migrating existing ABAP solutions onto SAP HANA without optimizing them might not cut the custard especially if you have already been using a state of the art database management system with clever caching strategies.
• However strategically moving solutions onto SAP HANA to benefit from applications that are optimized for SAP HANA is the way forward.