Overview of SAP HANA 2.0

In this blog post I want to elaborate and giving you an overview of SAP HANA 2.0.

Overview

Need for Digital Platform

The world is becoming the digital world, the world is now more connected and digital due to the extreme growth of mobile and tablets devices results the huge increase of data volume in every seconds and now the addition of “Intelligent” is much needed like never before. The “Intelligent” is that how we can get reward from any raw data smoothly. In today’s world the users needs instant response for their queries no matter how far the responsible person is. Data science is also available to businesses and every economic sector, this means machine learning and AI (Artificial Intelligence) is now displaying in every application due to this rapid and fruitful responses creating in every moment. New types of data is also available because of this the analysis on huge data has its high.


Solution by SAP

As this is the era of Intelligent enterprise where all the services like People management, Network and Data management, Customer experience etc has to be manage smartly. SAP provides a powerful digital platform where all the modern services available at a single platform, named SAP HANA.

Figure 1.1

SAP Covers this requirement of modern digital world by enhanced its technology through SAP HANA platform. It added new types of data which acquires real time data for real-time decisions. It gives complete environment for rapid application development with modern and innovative features with maximum utilizing the modern hardware.

Recommended book

For those who are newbie to SAP HANA I recommend “SAP Press’s SAP HANA 2.0, an Introduction”. Although, I didn’t read it completely but as an overview It covers all the areas that every developer, administrator, data scientist, data integrator required for clear understanding of technology. The book has use cases, road map, tools, examples and so on.

It not only has interested areas for the new ones of SAP HANA but also has complete range of recipes for those who want to upgrade and enhanced from the oldest version to SAP HANA 2.0.

It has clear comparison between classical development and advanced XS with the addition of prerequisite for XS advanced. It gives complete details of main stakes like SAP Web IDE for development and the SAP HANA Cockpit for administration of database and apps.

SAP HANA Features

1. Database Services

2. Security & Administration

3. Analytics and Data Processing

4. Application Development and Deployment

5. Data Access, Integration and Quality

6. Multi-Engines

A) Database Services

◉ The persistent memory (PMEM)

A very new advancement in the field of computer memory was the addition of new type of memory called persistent memory. It contains Non-Volatile data, low cost than DRAM but performance close to DRAM, much larger sizes available than DRAM. SAP recommend to use DRAM & PMEM at different ratio. SAP HANA smartly controls the data movement between DRAM & PMEM.

The main benefit and though of the SAP HANA is the drastic improvement in performance of database and applications because of its In-memory Database concept. In order to ease, all the complex calculations and results extraction is covers in the memory. Only the results manage in the application layer. During the operation not the complete Database in memory but only the relative and most demanding part of it that give the benefit of managing resources like RAM (cover persistent memory) and HARD DISK.

Figure 1.2 Self made in MS Paint

◉ Row and column based structure

Data store in Columns can also be partitioned for parallel process and distribute to different servers rapidly. It has row and column based structure of tables that has following replacement of old structures of tables.

Figure 1.3

We can use multiple tenant database as a single databases and can manage individually by using its cockpit interface.

◉ OLAP + OLTP = HTAP

SAP HANA caters transnational and analytic requirements in one single platform. It covers OLAP & OLTP (Online Transaction Processing = OLTP) and (Online Analytic Processing = OLAP) via new term HTAP (Hybrid Transaction / Analytic Processing).

B) Security & Administration

Security of the data is the important aspect of any ERP. SAP HANA covers it by Authorization and SSO – Single Sign On. All the activities regarding security handled by SAP HANA DBA Cockpit.

There are three levels of security access level using by SAP:

1. Actual Database objects

This is achieved by granting select permission on calculation views.

2. Row Level

This is achieved by defining analytic privilege and granting it to the user. This privilege defines by using simple SQL script.

3. Column Level

It is use for hiding data of columns by applying masking rules.

Administration can also be done using SAP HANA Cockpit smoothly. It covers Disaster recovery, backup tasks, memory utilization, CPU functioning etc.

C) Analytics and Data processing

Machine Learning and predictive analysis can be done in SAP HANA easily. SAP uses difference approaches for Predictive analysis which uses Predictive Analysis Library (PAL), Automated Predictive Library (APL), Extended Machine Learning (EML), R (algorithm library).

◉ PAL algorithms can be called directly from SQL script for all data mining approaches.

◉ In APL approach data selection, scoring and prediction is completely automated.

◉ In EML, SAP HANA access to external libraries for machine learning models. SAP HANA send its data like Image to TensorFlow where it is processed and the result will return to SAP server.

◉ In R approach, SAP connect to the R server. It basically uses for statistical models development.

For best representing data regarding networks like Transportation, Social, SCM networks, SAP uses Graph model. This shows the relationship between all nodes of a network in clear manner.

For collecting data gathered at regular interval SAP uses Series Data. SAP conclude and predicts fruitful meaning and conclusions from this data.

D) Application Development and Deployment

We can develop applications either on-premises or on-cloud infrastructure by using SAP HANA tools. Online application which deals with large amount of data can be develop using tools like Git, GitHub and programming languages like Python, JSON, OData, Java, Node.JS etc. We can easily develop reactive web applications based on HTML5 like SAP Fiori. It provides web-based application development tools like SAP Web IDE & for data modeling and administering the database SAP Architecture Designer is available for effective management of data.

E) Data Access, Integration and Quality

Data Access & Integration

We can access multiple resources of data from SAP HANA for any analytic process etc. SAP HANA provides data adapters for data integration and manipulation & also we can easily load data from different databases like Apache Hadoop etc.

Data Quality

SAP HANA provides data cleansing facility. Cleansing of data is the process of eliminating irrelevant data like names, contact numbers, address etc. As a result, the quality of data improved a lot.

F) Multi-Engines

SAP HANA provides a multi-engine query processing environment where multi-core CPUs, multiple CPUs per board and various boards on an application server are used. It makes data processing about a million times faster than that from the disk. It also facilitates different queries like SQL queries, Graph queries etc.