SAP HANA: Exploring data using SAP Visual Intelligence

SAP Visual Intelligence is SAP’s latest innovation in the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer solution family. It is a desktop-based visualization and data manipulation solution that allows business users to acquire data from a variety of corporate and personal data sources and manipulate without any scripting.
They can then analyze this data, with beautiful visualizations, quickly discovering unique insight that can be easily shared, shaping the business faster than ever before. -- As mentioned by SAP

Let us see what SAP says that we can do with SAP HANA using SAP Visual Intelligence:

What’s new in SAP HANA SPS12 – SAP HANA Graph Engine

What’s new in SAP HANA SPS12 – SAP HANA Graph Engine

SAP HANA Graph is an integrated part of SAP HANA core functionality. It expands (the functions of) relational database management systems, with native support for graph processing, and allows executing typical graph operations on all data stored in a SAP HANA system; which is automatically optimizes execution plans to execute highly performant queries, and built-in graph algorithms based on flexible schema property graph data model, to traverse on relationships without the need to predefined modeling and complex JOIN statements.

A first attempt at using HANA Cloud Integration to integrate Workday and Salesforce

Starting to do some research on this idea, I ran across an article about a recent agreement between Workday and Salesforce:
Under a technical agreement and go-to-market strategy, Salesforce and Workday will do the following:

• Salesforce will standardize on Workday's applications.
• Workday will standardize on Salesforce's applications and platform.
• Workday will integrate Salesforce with Workday's human capital management software, financials and big data analytics software.
• Salesforce will integrate Workday into Chatter and other applications. [SOURCE]

Then, I had an even more amusing thought – “What about a Workday – Salesforce integration”.

Since the Eclipse-based software for HCI is already available, I decided to see how far I could get with my nefarious – no - heretical plan.

Getting flexible with SAP HANA

Most of you might not be aware of a feature introduced on SAP HANA SPS5. This new feature is called "Flexible Tables", which means that you can define a table that will grow depending on your needs. Let's see an example...

You define a table with ID, NAME and LAST_NAME. The table works fine, but you realize that you need to also add the PhoneNumber and Address...in a normal situation, you will need to open the definition and add those fields...but using Flexibles Tables, you will need to only add those fields as part of the INSERT query and let SAP HANA do it's magic...

Of course, that scenario is very unlikely to happen, because for a couple of fields, it doesn't make sense...so...where do we use this Flexible Tables? Enterprise Search, were we need to have all products on one table, and this table can have a really big amount of columns...as different products will have different characteristics...

So...for this blog...I really break my head trying to find a simple scenario that could cover Flexible Tables...what I came up with? SAP HANA, Flexible Tables, R and Twitter...

The code is very complex, so I'm not going to explain line by line how it works...but of course, I'm going to give a nice overview...

SAP HANA: Using Hierarchies

In SAP HANA, we have a choice of creating 2 types of hierarchies:

1. Level Hierarchy
2. Parent Child Hierarchy 

Level Hierarchy:
     Each level represents a position in the hierarchy. For example, a time dimension might have a hierarchy that represents data at the month, quarter, and year levels.Each level above the base (or most detailed) level contains aggregate values for the levels below it. The members at different levels have a one-to-many parent-child relation. For example, Q1-05 and Q2-05 are the children of 2005, thus 2005 is the parent of Q1-05 and Q2-05.
Hierarchies and levels have a many-to-many relationship. A hierarchy typically contains several levels, and a single level can be included in more than one hierarchy.

In our example, let us take “Level Hierarchy”.

SAP HANA: Achieving Set operations using Joins

Now we can have multiple discussions. As we know that achieving with UNION is better than JOINS. But again it depends on the volumes of the data and the place at which you are applying it.

As per our experiences, we also know that if we can achieve with the help of Attribute /Analytic Views it is better than doing the same with Calculation View Graphical / SQL. In this document i have tried to achieve with Attribute views as much as possible and while doing this i came to know about the Full Outer Join option through graphical models is not possible anymore.

These are 7 questions on which Jody has discussed,

Here are our Tables:

Table 1:

Table 2: 

SAP HANA: What are packages in SAP HANA?

What is a Package?

This is a procedure for grouping together the related information objects in a structured way.

Types of Packages:

Use:

It groups all the information models and makes it easier to transport (import/export) the models which we have created in an efficient manner. Means we can "Package" our data models and easily import/export them to another HANA Studio instance.