What's in Store from SAP Hana

Let’s have a quick look at what does SAP Hana has in store for the business users.

Why is it Required?

A problem faced by business intelligence users who is using the data warehousing solution including SAP BW is the  volume of data that is generated by the organizations that  you need to crunch in order to analyze them and derive the useful information out of them.  Until recently the response from the technical team to this problem would be probably  to summarize more data in the data warehouse, which could well involve some redesign of the data warehouse itself.

Using the In-memory analytic solution you can solve it.  

The Beauty about the solutions such as SAP Hana is it is Largely driven by the business users themselves, it stream the data into high-speed RAM and give you a tool set to roll it into the right shape to get you the answers you need. also it reduces the time taken to generate the reports.

Data can be shown in “views”, on-screen dashboards or other graphical representations, and can be selected with various forms and drop-down menus.  Because of the intensity of processing required, in-memory products such as SAP HANA are often partnered with purpose-built hardware platforms. 

One of the major requirement for the solutions which uses in memory computing is the processing power of the hosted server, the hosted server should be powerful enough to handle Terra bytes of main memory.

What are the Advantages?

Speed, mostly. Speed in accessing data and speed in getting it (business users don’t need to wait for IT or DW developers to develop or modify existing data warehouses).

For example SAP claim that very complex reports and queries against 500 billion point-of-sale records were run in less than one minute, using multi-core processing algorithms and some pretty sassy software.

Other advantages are flexibility and scope of analysis in some cases, compared to a purpose-build data warehouse.  Thirdly, development costs can be lower.

 Typical in-memory analytic users will be examining very large quantities of data for underlying patterns and revelations, rather than running standard reports and analyzes or checking the KPIs (key performance indicators), for which a data warehouse solution will often be more appropriate.  A typical rallying call for in-memory analytic users would be “real time analysis” – the immediacy of getting valuable information from your transactions almost as it happens.

 The increasingly low cost and high speeds of RAM compared to the alternative of long development times and the clunky moving parts of database access make this a no-brainer for the future.  In-memory technology is here to stay.  But don’t throw out your existing data warehouse (and department!) quite yet.  There is also a place for a formalised and designed business intelligence analytic solution that delivers specific answers to specific questions.  Combined with a variety of other productivity and competitiveness-enhancing BI offerings in-memory analytics will work in conjunction with data warehousing to get BI analytic solutions to the people who need them.