Wednesday, 29 May 2019

Understanding HANA has never been this easy

Though a lot of materials can be found online talking about HANA, its features/advantages and so on. This blog is for newbies in HANA and will brief about HANA in very simple words.

Before we embark on our journey, lets define 3 most confusing terms which often thought to be similar by beginner.

   HANA                  Suite on HANA                   S/4 HANA

HANA is a database and S/4 HANA is the application that uses this database.

ECC 6.0 and below versions were mainly running on Oracle database that can be seen from System->Status->Database System.

And moving the database from Oracle or any other db to HANA DB is Suite on HANA.

SAP S/4 HANA Full form :
SAP Business Suite 4 (generation) for SAP High-performance ANalytic Appliance

Now, lets start with the topic “HANA”.

HANA is much more than a database, it is also a data processing platform. Now task of application layer is to mainly display what the user has asked for.

Note: Though HANA is doing all the calculations but to achieve complex scenarios, application layer is still used for data processing and calculations.

Features of HANA :


Data Source Independent: 

HANA enables customers to analyze huge volumes of data in real time, data aggregation can be done irrespective of data sources.

HYBRID In-Memory Database:

In-memory, because it stores data directly in main memory and Hybrid, because it stores data as Row store and Column store both.

Row Store: Data is stored as a sequence of records i.e. all the fields of one row are saved in contiguous memory locations.

Column Store: Data is stored as a sequence of fields i.e. all values in a column are stored in contiguous memory locations.

Parallel processing and Partitioning of data:

Parallel processing means that at least two microprocessors handle parts of an overall task.

e.g. In below snap it can be seen for processing or searching for a specific record Core 1 is dedicated to column 1 and core 2 is for column 2 and in case of partitioning two cores are dedicated to each half of the column 3 to speed up the data processing time.

SAP HANA Certifications, SAP HANA Study Materials, SAP HANA Guides

Multi- tenancy :

This is an architecture which allows multiple tenant/customer to share the same computing resource here HANA DB.  Each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants.

SAP HANA Certifications, SAP HANA Study Materials, SAP HANA Guides

◈ System tables and other data are stored in System DB which are required for proper functioning.
◈ Benefit while using cloud.
◈ Cost effective: Here we need not to pay for whole DB but for occupied memory only.
◈ Virtually we are creating a database inside HANA system.

Dynamic Tiering: 


It is classification of data into temperatures (Hot, Warm, Cold) based on its importance and performance expectations.

Hot data: Data is accessed frequently thus stored in main memory.

Warm data: Data is not accessed frequently and stored in disk based persistent storage.

Cold data:

Data is rarely accessed or inactive and is stored outside SAP HANA database.

SAP HANA Certifications, SAP HANA Study Materials, SAP HANA Guides

Supported Data type :


Text data :

Data from Social media feeds, help desk tickets, logs etc.

e.g.While commenting on social media platform we use SMS language, short forms such data falls under text data.

Spatial data:

Data that relates to locality, maps etc. e.g. GPS map based data.

Graph data: 

Data that related to highly networked entities like social network etc.These are real-time data that keep changes with high frequency.

e.g. followers count on social media, likes on a particular page/post, stock market indices.

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