If you’ve read anything which has come from SAP in the last few months you will have heard of HANA. I understood that SAP thought it was very important but didn’t really understand what it was and how it was going to affect me. After some reading, attending a couple of courses and being involved in some discussions with SAP I know a little more and would like to share it with you.
Very little of the individual technologies in HANA is new; there are other in-memory databases.HANA uses the TREX engine which is also used for the BW Accelerator. Additionally HANA incorporates the Column Store instead of a traditional Row Store, which improves the performance of data aggregation which is used by Sybase. However servers with large amounts of memory and multiple multi-core processors (10 core processors are available) are now available at reasonable prices making this a practical solution. A single HANA server can support 1TB of memory and databases can be partitioned over multiple servers. The availability of hardware and the combination of a number of technologies together with the optimization for parallel processing within HANA has delivered a potentially game changing solution.
There are four ways we may see HANA used.
In a future blog I’ll outline what’s involved in migrating a BPC NetWeaver environment to SAP HANA.
Implementing BPC v10 on HANA
SAP will be discussing the exciting benefits of the leading-edge, in-memory computing technology on the SAP HANA platform. We will discuss considerations around upgrading and implementing BPC v10 on HANA.