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You're reading from SAP HANA Cookbook Your all-inclusive guide to understanding SAP HANA with practical recipes with over 50 recipes

Product type Paperback

Published in Dec 2013

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781782177623

Length 284 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Tools

SAP Hana

Concepts

Database Administration

Table of Contents (16) Chapters

SAP HANA Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

1. SAP HANA Studio – Look and Feel FREE CHAPTER

2. Data Provisioning

3. Modeling

4. Reporting

5. Advanced Features in SAP HANA

6. User Management

Introduction to SAP HANA

Architecture

Applications Powered by SAP HANA

Index

Comparing BWA and SAP HANA

In this section, we will be covering the evolution of SAP HANA and its innovation process. SAP was one of the early pioneers in using in-memory technology as it has been highly consistent in improving the performance for gaining high data compression and achieving real-time analytics.

Evolution of SAP BWA and SAP HANA

TREX and SAP Enterprise Search were some of the first products to innovate and use the concepts of in-memory and column-based storage. Based on the strength of these products, SAP developed SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, which is an in-memory product mainly for performance optimization.

With SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator established in the customer's IT enterprise landscape and market, SAP has consistently expanded its vision to continuously innovate to utilize this in-memory technology to benefit its customers. The vision was to respond to the business requirements for enterprises in combining OLTP and OLAP by removing the requirements of pre-aggregated, precalculated queries/indexes and other related features resulting in data latency and days or weeks in getting the business reports.

SAP's focus on business intelligence has led to the decision to combine the business intelligence functions from SAP BusinessObjects (after SAP's acquisition of Business Objects at the end of the year 2007) with the in-memory analytical engine of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, creating an accelerated business intelligence solution called SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. With a focus on technology-agnostic solutions and heterogeneity, SAP then improvised SAP BusinessObjects Explorer by including data integration capabilities in SAP NetWeaver BW.

The innovative in-memory computing engine of SAP HANA is the next generation analytics technology. It complements today's SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator with enhancements and additional functions, including the replication and acceleration of transactional data for real-time analytics. Customers can use SAP HANA as not only the technology, but also the platform for delivering accelerated analytical solutions. SAP HANA, currently strategic in-memory real-time analytics, is a solution offered by SAP.

How it works…

Now let us compare BWA and SAP HANA.

Comparison

BWA was specifically designed to accelerate BW queries by reducing the data acquisition time by storing copies of the InfoCube data in-memory. The purpose of SAP BWA is to improve the query performance of SAP NetWeaver BW. The SAP BW 7.0 release and later versions supports SAP BWA. In simple terms, SAP BWA is optimized for SAP BW primarily for performance improvisation.

SAP HANA is an in-memory appliance and platform for delivering high-performance analytics and applications and also real-time analytical solutions. SAP HANA is a full-featured in-memory database, and the data can be loaded into SAP HANA from SAP and non-SAP data sources and be consumed using SAP BusinessObjects frontend tools. SAP HANA also acts as an in-memory database that powers SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 and later versions; SAP HANA can be used as accelerators also in implementing Sidecar scenarios and SOH—Business Suite on SAP HANA (CRM on HANA, SRM on HANA, and ERP on HANA). In this way, it is optimized and designed to dramatically improve the overall performance of SAP BW.