All about SAP HANA – composite post

I'm very well aware that there are already initiatives to get all information about HANA into single place. Therefore consider this blog as yet another HANA blog.

As I started similarly with SAP BW 7.3 I try to collect all relevant information sources about in this case SAP HANA here. BTW: What’s HANA? In short it is in-memory solution from SAP. It stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance and basically it is appliance (plus its software components) that can absorb large volumes of data (e.g. tera bytes) into its “operational” memory. The reason why it is so high performant is that all the data is in memory not stored in hard drives. It can be set up on top of SAP ERP or BW system (plus non SAP databases) without necessity to materialize data via transformations as in contrary to current DWH solutions. HANA bundles several components: in-memory computing engine, real-time replication service, data modeling and data services. As it is delivered as appliance it is depended currently on few vendors are supported: Fujitsu, HP, and IBM.

Basically we can say that HANA successor of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator as moving forward into in-memory computing. Here HANA acts as persistence mechanism for SAP NetWeaver BW.

HANA components:

1. The core of HANA is called SAP In-Memory Computing Engine (IMCE or ICE, also called as NewDB or BAE). It is an engine kind of in memory database which uses row/column/object based database technology to store data. It is for parallel data processing using state-of-the art CPU possibilities.

2. HANA Studio (client app, or Studio Repository, Eclipse based editor connected to a HANA
Server backend) consists of:
2.1 Administration console - administer and monitor database
2.2 Information modeler - data modeling
2.3 Lifecycle mngt - provides an HANA stack update using SAP Software Update Manager (SUM)

3. HANA Load Controller -resides in SAP HANA, coordinates the entire replication process: It starts the initial load of source system data to the IMDB in SAP HANA, and communicates with the Sybase Replication Server to coordinate the start of the delta replication

4. Host Agent -handles login authentication between source system and target system

5. Sybase Replication Server -accepts data from Replication Agent, distributes and applies this data to the target database using ECDA/ODBC for connectivity.

Current versions:
SAP HANA 1.0 SP02 - as of 12th June 2011 in general availability


Operating system: //only following one:
64-bit SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1 operating system

Upcoming version:
Nov 2011 - SAP starts rump up program for their customers to run BW-on-HANA as its database

Read more at : http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/28011