HANA

HANA: SAP HANA is a combination of hardware and software specifically made to process massive real time data using In-Memory computing

2 Tera bytes RAM……….

It wasn't discussed at Sapphire, but the other potential beneficiaries of Hana are third-party BI vendors and those customers. Hana supports both SQL and MDX query, simplifying access by third-party tools such as IBM Cognos, Oracle BIEE, and MicroStrategy. These vendors are currently forced to rely on BW's BAPI interface, which can be slow.

HARDWARE DESIGN:

Huge amount of data is divided into multiple sets which are then crunched separately by the Blades as shown below.

Pic : Data is divided into 4 blades with 2 standby blades

The Blades are composed of multiple CPU’s per blade and each CPU has multiple cores per CPU.

This means if you say for example 8 cores per CPU and 4 such CPU’s per blade. So mere 4 Blades will have 128 cores crunching data in parallel.

SOFTWARE DESIGN:

HANA stores data in Column wise for fast computing. The below diagram compares, how data is stored row wise and column wise.

For example: If system wants to find aggregate of the second column i.e. 10+35+2+40+12.

In Row wise: The system has to jump memory address to collect subsequent values for aggregation.

That is data records are available as complete tuples in one read which makes accessing of few attributes expensive operation.

In Column wise: A single scan would fetch the results much faster.

HOW IT WORKS:

SAP HANA can be used without disturbing our current IT landscape. In the above diagram show that data in the database can be replicated near real time into HANA and can be used for reporting with a number of BI tools directly sitting on the top of the HANA.