30-12-2015, 04:37 PM
The Platform for Next-Generation Applications and Analytics
SAP HANA converges database and application platform capabilities in-memory to transform transactions, analytics, text analysis, predictive and spatial processing so businesses can operate in real-time.
How SAP HANA Enables Business of the Future
SAP HANA is the engine on which completely new applications can be based, able to crunch the growing masses of data that companies and institutions need to obtain real-time insight into their operations and stakeholders. In the book, The In-Memory Revolution, co-authored by Hasso Plattner and Bernd Leukert, you will read examples on both the business benefits and the technology of SAP HANA, addressing readers from both business and technological backgrounds.
SAP HANA technology changing the game?
Critical Technology Driving Business
By eliminating the divide between transactions and analytics, SAP HANA allows you to answer any business question anywhere in real time.When you place predictive analytics, spatial processing and data virtualization on the same architecture, innovating with your big data is simplified and accelerated.SAP HANA drives performance, expedites processes and truly revolutionizes business.
SAP HANA for Developers
SAP HANA gives developers the opportunity to quickly build impactful, highly-scalable applications that leverage the massive speed and scale of the SAP HANA platform.
SAP HANA In-Memory Platform
Make real-time business a reality with SAP HANA, our in-memory database and application platform. Designed to simplify your IT environment, our powerful platform releases the intelligence in your business data and processes – so that you can accelerate critical decisions and innovate throughout your operations.
Analytics and Applications
A.Real-time analytics – The Categories of Analytics which HANA specializes
Operational Reporting (real-time insights from transaction systems such as custom or SAP ERP). This covers Sales Reporting (improving fulfillment rates and accelerating key sales processes), Financial Reporting (immediate insights across revenue, customers, accounts payable, etc.), Shipping Reporting (better enabling complete stock overview analysis), Purchasing Reporting (complete real-time analysis of complete order history) and Master Data Reporting (real-time ability to impact productivity and accuracy).
Data Warehousing (SAP NetWeaver BW on HANA) – BW customers can run their entire BW application on the SAP HANA platform leading to unprecedented BW performance (queries run 10-100 times faster; data loads 5-10 times faster; calculations run 5-10 times faster), a dramatically simplified IT landscape (leads to greater operational efficiency and reduced waste), and a business community able to make faster decisions. Moreover, not only is the BW investment of these customers preserved but also super-charged. Customers can migrate with ease to the SAP HANA database without impacting the BW application layer at all.
Predictive and Text analysis on Big Data - To succeed, companies must go beyond focusing on delivering the best product or service and uncover customer/employee /vendor/partner trends and insights, anticipate behavior and take proactive action. SAP HANA provides the ability to perform predictive and text analysis on large volumes of data in real-time. It does this through the power of its in-database predictive algorithms and its R integration capability. With its text search/analysis capabilities SAP HANA also provides a robust way to leverage unstructured data.
B.Real-time applications – The Categories of Applications which HANA specializes
Core process accelerators – Accelerate business reporting by leveraging ERP Accelerators, which are non-disruptive ways to take advantage of in-memory technology. These solutions involve an SAP HANA database sitting next to a customer’s SAP ERP system. Transactional data is replicated in real-time from ECC into HANA for immediate reporting, and then results can even be fed back into ECC. Solutions include CO-PA Accelerator, Finance and Controlling Accelerator, Customer Segmentation Accelerator, Sales Pipeline Analysis, and more.
Planning, Optimization Apps – SAP HANA excels at applications that require complex scheduling with fast results, and SAP is delivering solutions that no other vendor can match. These include Sales & Operational Planning, BusinessObjects Planning & Consolidation, Cash Forecasting, ATP calculation, Margin calculation, Manufacturing scheduling optimization (from start-up Optessa), and more.
Sense & response apps – These applications offer real-time insights on Big Data such as smart meter data, point-of-sale data, social media data, and more. They involve complexities such as personalized insight and recommendations, text search and mining, and predictive analytics. Only SAP HANA is well suited for such applications, including Smart Meter Analytics, SAP Supplier InfoNet, SAP precision retailing, and Geo-spatial Visualization apps (from start-up Space-Time Insight). Typically these processes tend to be data-intensive and many could not be deployed in the past owing to cost and performance constraints.
What is the secret sauce?
Other database management systems on the market are typically either good at transactional workloads, or analytical workloads, but not both. When transactional DBMS products are used for analytical workloads, they require you to separate your workloads into different databases (OLAP and OLTP). You have to extract data from your transactional system (ERP), transform that data for reporting, and load it into a reporting database (BW). The reporting database still requires significant effort in creating and maintaining tuning structures such as aggregates and indexes to provide even moderate performance.
Due to its hybrid structure for processing transactional workloads and analytical workloads fully in-memory, SAP HANA combines the best of both worlds. You don’t need to take the time to load data from your transactional database into your reporting database, or even build traditional tuning structures to enable that reporting. As transactions are happening, you can report against them live. By consolidating two landscapes (OLAP and OLTP) into a single database, SAP HANA provides companies with massively lower TCO in addition to mind-blowing speed.
Architecture:
The main process, called the index server, has a structure shown in the diagram to the right.
The indexer performs session management, authorization, transaction management and command processing. Note that HANA has both a row store and a column store. Users can create tables using either store, but the column store has more capabilities. The index server also manages persistence between cached memory images of database objects, log files and permanent storage files.
The Authorization manager provides authentication and authorization services. The Authorization Manager can provide security based on SAML, OAuth or Kerberos authentication protocols.
The Extended Services (XS) Engine is a web server with privileged access to the database. Applications written with server-side JavaScript or as Java Servlets can be deployed to the XS Engine. These can either be HTML web applications or REST web service endpoints. Server-side JavaScript includes jQuery-based extensions for database access and to access HTTP request and response messages. The JavaScript engine is based on the Mozilla SpiderMonkey project.
Client applications access the HANA database directly using JDBC or via the Extended Services Engine using HTTP.
To overcome input/output bottlenecks, HANA was designed as an in-memory server, meaning that the first access to a table causes the entire table to be read and maintained in memory. Background processes maintain log files and the long-term disk storage. The query processor uses massively parallel processing. The column data store reduces the amount of data that needs to be read and eliminates the need for indexing.
Applications can bypass the SQL processor and access the Calculation Engine directly by composing XML-based queries. There are three types of non-SQL query objects: Attribute Views, Calculation Views and Analytic Views. In many cases, application performance can be increased by using these views instead of SQL queries.
Developers Community
The focal point of the community of developers on SAP HANA platform is SAP HANA Developer Center or "the DevCenter". The DevCenter offers general information, education materials, community forums, plus access to SAP HANA database with free licenses hosted in the public cloud (like CloudShare, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure). Access to some materials and features may require free registration.
SAP HANA, short for "High-Performance Analytic Appliance" is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. HANA's architecture is designed to handle both high transaction rates and complex query processing on the same platform.
What is the database used in SAP?
Roughly half of SAP customers run their enterprise-grade applications on Oracle Database. Most other SAP customers use IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, in that order. SAP says it has more than 3,000 Hana customers, but that's just over 1% of its total customer base.
SAP HANA features & benefits:
The in-memory technology lets users explore and analyse all transactional and analytical data in real time from virtually any data source.
Source-agnostic data access & integration services allow accessing and indexing external data from across the entire organisation and adding them to existing analytical models.
Real-time analytical processing can be performed to analyse business operations in real-time using huge volumes of detailed information while business is happening.
Data can be aggregated from many applications and data sources without perturbing in any way the on-going business transactions.
Views of business information can be persisted in a Persistent Data Repository, and reconstituted in case of a crash.
Real-time Replication Service can be used to access and replicate data from SAP ERP.
Tight integration with SAP Business Objects BI solutions for insight and analytics.
SQL and MDX interfaces for third- party application access.
Unified information modelling and design environment. The great advantage here is that all data models are purely virtual, and calculate results based on the underlying detailed operational data.
Simplification of existing models, of modelling and re-modelling.
Reduced costs through simplifications in hardware, maintenance and testing.
Simplified Operations and Monitoring with the integration of basic HANA administration capabilities with the BW Admin Cockpit.
Unified information modelling and design environment. The great advantage here is that all data models are purely virtual, and calculate results based on the underlying detailed operational data.
Simplification of existing models, of modelling and re-modelling.
Reduced costs through simplifications in hardware, maintenance and testing.
Simplified Operations and Monitoring with the integration of basic HANA administration capabilities with the BW Admin Cockpit.
Benifits of HANA SAP in cloud computing:
Hybrid Approach. SAP HANA in the Cloud combines cloud computing and in-memory performance advantages. SAP HANA hybrid can be implemented in a hybrid approach for flexibility across multiple deployment models:
Business process-wise: adoption of SAP HANA in or off the Cloud
Application-wise: segregation to SAP HANA
Time-wise: phased over time adoption of SAP HANA
Risk-wise: Leveraged as a means to access new applications in the Cloud, eventually and optionally migrating these on-premise (using Cloud as a proof of concept and test bench)
System-wise: using the Cloud for development and test, maybe quality assurance, but keeping your production environment on-premise for example
Holistic. SAP HANA in the Cloud is part of a set of solutions geared toward improving business insight.
Near-Zero Latency. SAP HANA is capable of performing complex calculations on big or complex data very fast. This means not waiting to process the calculations after business events and triggers occur, but as they occur, so that decisions can be executed immediately. In this environment, speed equals an “unfair” competitive advantage.
IN REAL TIME-core business process planning & optimization sensing & Response.
-Analysis & Applications on a single platform.
-Eg:playing online games each performance upgrade your operational reporting.
-60-80xfaster queries.
-10xfaster data load.
-9.1xmove data compression.
SAP HANA
SAP HANA,short for "HIGH PERFORMANCE ANALYTIC APPLIANCE.
HANA is not an acronym.
Roughly half of SAP customers run their enterprise-grade applications on Oracle DB.
IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.