, I liked the idea of getting rid of BIA with adding DB buffer cache for Oracle and have a system with enough RAM and kernel processing to maintain the RAM.
But I don't think it will be that straight forward and simple. For the data to persist in the DB buffer cache, you will have to pin the objects in the memory and ensure that the updates are applied regularly along with persistence to the physical disk.
Secondly there should not be any bottleneck on the Buffer cache. I guess standard Oracle database is not tuned for these kind of operations and they came up with the concept of "Times Ten". Also the DB buffer cache doesn't keep the data in columnar format hence compression may not be expected.
Coming to why RDS is treated separately, I think it is because you need enhancements on the SAP ECC side to write the transactions / data to the HANA database ALONG with the standard database. Also the reporting logic in the ECC has to be modified so that it can read the HANA database instead of the standard database.
So it means additional component of development which benefits the clients. The approach is really good and SAP is indeed good at it.
And as "The Joker" said in "The Dark Knight", If you're good at something, never do it for free.
< Come on, its Friday >
Regards,
Ravi
Thx Ravi for your patient replies. Yes its Friday. Enjoy your weekends guys
Hi Prateek,
To some extent, I think SAP is trying to rectify the mistake of giving away BW for free 
However, let me take issue with your statement:
Prateek Sonthalia wrote:
You dont even need BI Accelerator if you have Oracle RAM Disks and put Infocube data into RAM. Just that Accelerator compresses it. What is normally the ratio of the compression ? We used to buffer Master Data Tables about 500 MB into RAM of the SAP BW instance.
That is not really true. Despite SAP's marketing push around "in memory", both BWA and HANA do far more that simply storing the existing data in RAM. In addition to being in RAM, data is stored in a column-based data model (making it much faster for most analytic queries), is compressed (leveraging, at least in part, the columnar data model), and can be processed in a massively parallel manner. All of these are things that simply throwing an existing database architecture on to a RAM-disk does not accomplish. In fact, all of these things would pay off with a disk-based architecture as well. Sybase IQ pretty much does all of these things on disk rather than in RAM, as an example.
That's why SAP didn't just rebrand LiveCache and call it HANA
Cheers,
Ethan
I understand what you are saying Ethan. There are parallelising technologies available with pure databases also. Columnar databases are like Bitmap Indexes where the SIDs are stored in columns. It is there in pure databases. It is there in Standard BW on Oracle.
Going by what Ravindra is saying, which you probably support, :-) SAP will have to rewrite the SAP Kernel and the BW Application for the transform and loading. I am happy I dont have to decide whether to invest or no.... :-)
ECC will be available on HANA by end 2012. Will SAP move all the ECC Application logic to HANA ?
I think SAP has been an ERP Application company, not a database company. I dont know if they should/would change course.
Disclaimer - Want to qualify here that opinions expressed are my persoanl opinions and dont represent the opinions of either my employer or any other organisation. Also I am not an SAP Employee. These are discussions from the perspective of trying to understand and get to the bottom of the HANA offering
COPA RDS is definitely not Rapid in practice . Although it is sweet in therory , and once does not have to do any table / field searching and joining .. but seems that every other client trying COPA accelerator is running into issues .
and SAP released a 450 $ COPA RDS for HANA online training . Its JUNK , and poor in quality and lacks useful information. One can glean out more useful information from trhe RDS package documentaion( i.e best practices) .
I am really annoyed at SAP for even wanting to charge 450 $ for that CRAP .....
I am now going to reccomend ORACLE ERP to all customers when it comes out in 2020 .
Where have you found a price for RDS? What amount of "extra money" does it cost?
Hi David,
You can find the RDS pricing in SAP ECohub site.
This has information about the customer who are offering which solution and pricing of that.
http://ecohub.sap.com/store/rds/catalog#!search:0
Regards,
Venkatesh
I would differ from you on that venkat. I dont think any Database company can match SAP ECC, and its technology foundation, I have known and worked on SAP for nearly 13/14 years. The SAP BASIS backbone is unbeatable and a piece of genius and will always remain so.
There have been waves from time to time, like the Sun Java wave, which came and went away. There are things built around the periphery of the Core SAP BASIS, but they could not penetrate or disturb the core of ECC. How many customers today use the Java J2EE Engine of the SAP Netweaver architecture ? I think its very less. I got swept away by this wave in 2002-03, myself personally, but then regained lost ground.
How many database technologies / languages have the features of ABAP, with all the new concepts introduces in ABAP. PL/SQL can never even come close to ABAP Generic programming and the features that ABAP has to offer.
Hi David, that is what I have seen and read in places. I dont have specific figures or places where I read but I know I have read that. It is good if you say what I am saying is not true, it will go towards creating new work products on the SAP Platform, and HANA will get wider acceptability.
HANA as a database technology is exciting and new things can be done with it, but I doubt if it will be able to touch the BW core.
Like I said in my earlier discussions, when I used to prove that figures in BW Reports, match ECC figures 100%, I used to make Infosets in SQ01,02,03. The Infosets were a join of some simple tables in the ECC System. It used to make me wonder why does SAP have such a convoluted method of extraction. I am sure some of the shortcomings of BW will be addressed by HANA.
Dear Moderator,
Request you to close this discussion thread. The intention was to understand the HANA offering technically. This discussion thread is going into another dimension :-)
Dont want to comment on the commercial/pricing policies of a company. That was not the intention.
Thanks & regards
Prateek
Yes I agree with Prateek. I have been following this thread and now this conversation not what this forum is intended for. If you want to understand SAP HANA then fine. Please delete this thread.
Regards Jon
You can always use the "report abuse" button on any of the individual comments/responses. No need to delete the whole thread .
