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. 

In Memory Database - an Eye Opener

We have seen some thing about SAP HANA, Now we will also see some thing more about the In Memory Database. 

An in-memory database (IMDB) is a database management system that primarily relies on main memory for computer data storage. It is contrasted with database management systems which employ a disk storage mechanism. Main memory databases are faster than disk-optimized databases since the internal optimization algorithms are simpler and execute fewer CPU instructions. Accessing data in memory reduces the I/O reading activity when querying the data which provides faster and more predictable performance than disk. In applications where response time is critical, such as telecommunications network equipment and mobile ads networks, main memory databases are often used.

The in-memory approach involves placing the entire database within a server's working memory, rather than storing it on disk. This cuts the time it takes to write data to, or read data from, the disk, which typically can take two to four milliseconds. An in-memory write or read can take less than a millisecond. Keeping all your tables in memory means you literally get a 3 orders of magnitude speedup (1000x), and you can use simple generic indexing strategies so the code becomes really simple. 

Today's largest transactional systems, such as those found in the financial community, can do as many as 300,000 to 400,000 transactions per second, and that number is expected to balloon to over a million per second in the years to come. In many cases, the database disk writes and reads are the performance bottlenecks to such systems.

In-memory databases can also be used by government and corporate intelligence organizations, to quickly analyze terabytes of information.

Why In Memory Database will be faster that Disk based database?

Data-Transfer in Disk Based DBMS:

Consider the hand offs required for an application to read a piece of data from a traditional disk-based database, modify it and write that piece of data back to the database. The process is illustrated in Figure 1.

1. The application requests the data item from the database run-time through the database API.
2. The database run-time instructs the file-system to retrieve the data from the physical media.
3. The file-system makes a copy of the data for its cache and passes another copy to the database.
4. The database keeps one copy in its cache and passes another copy to the application.
5. The application modifies its copy and passes it back to the database through the database API.
6. The database run-time copies the modified data item back to database cache.
7. The copy in the database cache is eventually written to the file-system, where it is updated in the file-system cache.
8. Finally, the data is written back to the physical media.

These steps cannot be turned off in a traditional database, even when processing takes place entirely within memory. And this simplified scenario doesn't account for the additional copies and transfers required for transaction logging!

In contrast, an in-memory database system entails little or no data transfer. The application may make copies of the data in local program variables, but it is not required. Instead, the IMDS gives the application a pointer that refers directly to the data item in the database, enabling the application to work with the data directly. The data is still protected because the pointer is used only through the database API, which insures that it is used properly. Elimination of multiple data transfers streamlines processing. Cutting multiple data copies reduces memory consumption, and the simplicity of this design makes for greater reliability.

In recent years, main memory databases have attracted the interest of larger database vendors. TimesTen, a start-up company founded by Marie-Anne in 1996 as a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard, was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2005. Oracle now markets this product as both a standalone database and an in-memory database cache to the Oracle database. IBM acquired SolidDB in 2008, and Microsoft is widely rumored to be launching an in-memory solution in 2009^.SAP announced general availability of SAP HANA in June 2011.

Latest Innovation from SAP- SAP HANA

If you are an SAP Consultant/Enterprise Architect, I challenge you that you will definitely like the latest buzz around the new innovation that is happening in SAP's technological Platform. that is SAP HANA,

HANA Stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance

From mainframes to commodity x86 servers, from database technology to enterprise applications, and from enterprise-architecture strategy to IT-infrastructure planning, SAP HANA is accelerating a series of significant changes not only within the IT vendor community but also within the expectations of customers about what the future of computing will look like.

For customers, SAP is promising that its HANA in-memory platform will allow them to strip out layers of brittle and unproductive infrastructure and nondisruptively create an entirely new IT environment that offers far greater performance at significantly lower prices


What is SAP HANA?
Hana is the technology that allows processing of massive quantities of data in Servers main memory and provides immediate results for analysis and Transactions. It's built on the concept of In-Memory Computing.

What is In-Memory Computing?

High performance in-memory computing will change how enterprises work. Currently, enterprise data is split into two databases for performance reasons. Usually, disk-based row-oriented database systems are used for operational data and column-oriented databases are used for analytics (e.g. “sum of all sales in China grouped by product”). While analytical databases are often kept in-memory, they can are often also mixed with disk-based storage media.

Transactional data and analytical data are not stored in the same database: analytical data resides in separate data warehouses, to which it is replicated in batch jobs. In consequence, flexible real-time reporting is not possible and leaders are forced to make decisions based on insufficient information in very short time frames.

This is about to change, since hardware architectures have evolved dramatically during the past decade. Multi-core architectures and the availability of large amounts of main memory at low costs are about to set new breakthroughs in the software industry. It has become possible to store data sets of entire Fortune 500 companies in main memory. At the same time, orders of magnitude faster performance than with disk-based systems can be achieved.

What to Expect From HANA?
Imagine reports that used to take a minute to run now running instantaneously. Imagine the satisfaction of your user community if all or most of their reports and analysis ran instantaneously. Line-of-business users will pay for this capability, and that will open the door for SAP HANA. After HANA gets in the door, I’m sure the CIO will find tons of additional uses for it. This is huge, and will generate truckloads of money for SAP, while also making customers super-satisfied.

In the long run, SAP HANA may indeed revolutionize enterprise business applications, but that remains to be seen. Right now, SAP HANA should be capable of creating substantial customer benefits – and generating a very large revenue stream to SAP.

Watch out this Space for more...

Free ERP/ Open Source ERP

Free ERP/ Open Source ERP is the term relating to software which can be freely used, copied, studied, modified, and redistributed by everyone that obtains a copy: "free software" or "open source software". Typically, this means software which is distributed with a free software license, and whose source code is available to anyone who receives a copy of the software.

The Following list names some of the free ERP/ Open source ERP available in the market, These ERPs are not making major impact in the market Share of the big ERP companies because many of the Free ERP softwares were developed by the communities and not by the companies, hence there is no reliable support available for them. Though there few ERPs like Compiere which is a Open source ERP has some some support available from the company which developed it.

One of the major factor is that many of the Open source / Free ERP is matured enough to handle the complex operations of big corporates. Most of the Open ERP has been developed by having only some of the process in mind and they are not globally scalable to the needs of the MNCs.

There are some innovative ERPs like webERP, WebERP is a web-based LAMP application with the goals being:

A light-weight HTTP/S interface suitable for both high and low speed Internet connections. Scripts have been crafted to present as small a load as possible on the web-server, the internet connection and the browser. Javascript is used sparingly to ensure cross platform consistency and minimal bandwidth requirements.

Following is the list of Open Source/ Free ERP

• Adempiere
• Apache OFBiz

• BlueErp
• Bots (edi)

• Compiere

• Dolibarr

• ERP5

• FrontAccounting

• GNU Enterprise

• HeliumV

• IntarS

• JFire

• MSupply

• OpenAccounting
• Openbravo

• OpenERP
• OpenMFG
• Openpro
• Opentaps

• PhreeBooks
• Postbooks

• Tryton

• WebERP

Reasons for SAP's Success.

There might be several other reasons for SAP's success and Domination in the ERP market, this particular blogs are my views on SAP's tremendous success in the ERP Market.

1)  Track Record
  The first and foremost reason is their good track record for the support services that SAP has, there might be a lot of vendor who might be a new player in the market or even an existing large player. No one has a good track record like SAP. for the small players, there is no guaranty that they will survive for next 5 years. This is a key factor which influences the Corporates decision making. In fact corporates will never like to buy a solution offered by companies with less than 5 years of existence.

2) Focus and adaptability
As we all know that SAP's primary focus is on ERP and it does not have any other vested interest in other areas as Oracle has in Database and Microsoft has it in other range of products. Other important factor is that it can be implemented on most of the OS and Database systems available in the market.

3) SAP Strong Partnership
Over the years SAP has build a strong partnership space. who contributes heavily to the success of SAP's ERP product in many domains.

4) Truly Global and Process Centric Approach
SAP's design is truly Global, means, the SAP product can be implemented in any country seamlessly and it can be integrated with many other existing software landscape. Allows easier global integration (barriers of currency exchange rates, language, and culture can be bridged easily).

5)Reducing Redundancy
SAP's can able to maintain centralized information thus reducing the redundancy of the information that gets stored in the Databases.

There are many more advantages of using the SAP products, the above are few most important of them in my View.