The announcement of the SAP HANA platform has created a lot of buzz in the IT and business world. As new business demands challenge the status quo, the scale is larger, expectations are greater, and the stakes are higher. New-breed IT systems must be able to evaluate, analyze, predict, and recommend – and do so in real time. An in-memory approach is the only way to tackle a real-time-data future that includes new data types such as social media monitoring and Web-automated sensors and meter readings.
Today’s business users need to react much more quickly to changing customer and market environments. They demand dynamic access to raw data in real time. SAP HANA empowers users with flexible, on-the-fly data modeling functionality by providing nonmaterialized views directly on detailed information. SAP HANA liberates users from the wait time for data model changes and database administration tasks, as well as from the latency required to load the redundant data storage required by traditional databases. The elimination of aggregates and relational table indices and the associated maintenance can greatly reduce the total cost of ownership.
Some use the term “in-memory” in the context of optimizing the I/O access with database management, centering on accessing data from the hard disk by pre-storing frequently accessed data in main memory. The term is also used for a traditional relational database running on in-memory technology. Some solutions offer columnar storage on traditional hard-disk technology, while other platforms offer the option of storing data on solid state disks (SSD). Although these disks have no moving parts and access data much more rapidly than hard disks, they are still slower than in-memory access.
Only SAP HANA takes full advantage of all-new hardware technologies by combining columnar data storage, massively parallel processing (MPP), and in-memory computing by using optimized software design.
Many SAP customers have already successfully deployed SAP HANA to drive innovations in IT and in business. In one scenario, SAP HANA supports data marts for ultrafast analytics with extreme data volumes, where users require more detailed information with access unrestricted by aggregations or caching of some of the data sourced from systems running SAP and non-SAP software.
In a second scenario, SAP HANA replaces traditional relational databases underneath SAP applications. The SAP NetWeaver® Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) component, a proven enterprise data warehouse solution, is the first application where SAP customers can migrate their existing database to an SAP HANA database.
In a third scenario, using a database connection (DB Connect), the SAP HANA database can be connected as a secondary database to the SAP ERP application, for example, and provide accelerated data processing for existing SAP applications. SAP CO-PA Accelerator software is the fir st solution delivered to SAP customers using this functionality.
This document provides a general understanding of SAP HANA as of support package 3 (SP03). It presents insights to the impact of SAP HANA on IT portfolio management and enterprise architecture; metadata and master data support; people, processes, and structures in business and IT; and data lifecycle management. It complements the SAP white paper SAP HANA for Next-Generation Business Applications and Real-Time Analytics and the SAP thought leadership paper SAP In-Memory Computing Technology: Changing the Way Business Intelligence Is Managed. For details on how to access these papers as well as other information about SAP HANA and in-memory computing, see the “Additional Information” section at the end of this document.