What is SAP HANA?

HANA is SAP’s own developed Database for it’s application suites. SAP has different types of application suits which are suitable for various business needs. Currently SAP’s main market is on ERP which has more than 60% of market share with it when compared to it’s competitors. Before HANA is introduced by SAP, all of its Business Suite Applications run on all leading Databases like Oracle, DB2, MaxDb, SQL where it can dependent on all these DB vendors, SAP aquired few of its competitors w.r.t DB but there is major competence from Oracle, SQL and few others.

Thinking of this SAP started developing it’s own database and succeeded it in the form of HANA, it defined as High performance analytical appliance.

The definition it self says that the functionality of HANA, with high performancec, yes it should be also.

There are few major differences between traditional Databases and HANA, where as traditionla databases requires lower memory than HANA w.r.t SAP Business Suites but where as HANA requires more memory which is nearly 10 times greater than traditional databases, it is something wondering but the functionlaity resides in HANA required that much of memory to work on.

Yes, HANA requires more memory and h/w upgradations if a company wants to acquire it in their landscapes, but the thoughts of SAP in HANA are now become reality and it succeeded.

The main concept of HANA is In-Memory, where all the DB resided in RAM instead of Hard drive of machine. It’s true that all the Database of a business suite application resides on RAM, that’s why its retrieval is nearly 15–20 times faster than traditional Business Suite application with other Database and HANA proved it also in real time.

Now SAP HANA moved to cloud and it has introduced many number of inbuilt connections to various business requirements and latest internet revolutions and conecpets and also it highly using for analytics, predictions and many more like IOT, BlockChain, Big Data connectivity etc.

SAP also released Business Suits on HANA from ERP 6 Ehp7 onwards and Netwaver 750 onwards, it also introducced a dedicated Business Suite S/4HANA only on SAP HANA, now a days it is trending topic on both Cloud and On-Premise.

There much more information to add about HANA here, but it is my overall information on HANA.

What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is a full in-memory and parallel ACID compliant database, that takes advantage of large main memories and massive parallel processing on multi-core CPU’s. It is used to handle almost all the diverse workloads such as OLAP and OLTP , structured and unstructured or simple and complex data in a single instance.

Why did SAP build a database?

HANA is a realization of Hasso Plattner’s idea of a single in-memory columnar database for OLTP AND OLAP workloads. Hasso believed that if a database could be built with a zero response time, that business applications would be written fundamentally differently – and IT landscapes could be simplified.

What makes SAP HANA fundamentally different?

• HANA leverages the modern hardware technology . It uses large main memories and massive parallel processing on multi-core CPU’s . Due to this, the access speed increases and response time decreases.
• It stores all data in-memory and in a columnar format (via encoding). Though, it is both row and column stored. Due to columnar structure many of the transactions like aggregations become quite fast.
• And,this can reduce the database footprint by 95%.
• All the operations are carried on demand , in the memory.This makes it possible to run OLTP and analytics applications in a single instance.
• Apart from this, HANA also has certain mechanisms like delta storage and row-level insert and update performance.
• Also, SAP HANA has added bunch of functionalities like data virtualization, search, text analysis, geospatial etc

What are SAP HANA Services?

• Application Services – 2-tier and 3-tier
• Processing Services – Text, Spatial, Graph
• Integration Services – Multiple data consumption options with built-in ETL
• Database Services – OLTP and OLAP

Where is SAP HANA used?

• Optimizing business operations
• Operational Reports , Dashboards and analytics
• Real-time operational intelligence
• Data Warehouse and Data mart
• Big Data
• Decision Support, Simulation and Automation.

Is SAP HANA just a database?

NO. SAP HANA was designed to be a modern database but it’s actually a database and a platform that can be deployed on-premise and on cloud.

SAP HANA is the latest ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) solution from SAP. It is a full-fledged, in-memory relational Database which can be deployed on-premise as well as cloud.

SAP HANA is specially optimized for transactional( OLAP) as well as analytical(OLAP) processing. Not just that, this platform has libraries for predictive analytics, planning, text processing, spatial and business analytics too.

SAP HANA offers high performance and advanced capabilities such as integrated data mining. SAP HANA is considered to be one of the best solutions for real-time analytics. It supports various real-time analytics use cases, for example:

• Monitoring telecommunications network and optimizing it.
• Optimization of supply chain and retail
• Fraud detection and security
• Forecasting reporting
• SAP HANA is basically designed to process and analyze structured data from relational databases.

SAP HANA also provides ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) compliance. It offers real-time replication feature. It can perform 3 types of Data replication, depending on the source of the data:

• log based
• ETL(extract transform and load) based
• trigger based

Some of the most adored features of SAP HANA:

• High speed: Since the data is stored directly in the memory, it provides instantaneous results.
• Planning board: SAP HANA provides a configurable graphical planning interface known as planning board where you can graphically display the scheduling situations
• Real-time access to the data: SAP HANA provides the facility to access your data in real time and thus helps in real-time decision making.
• Simple: Easy to use, user-friendly interface.