Licensing, Sizing and Architecting BW on HANA

I've had more than a few questions on BW on HANA Licensing and Sizing, and it seems that there isn't anything authoritative in the public domain. So here we go, but before we start...

Caveats

Architecting BW on HANA systems requires some care. First, database usage, number of indexes and aggregates, use of database compression, reorgs and non-Unicode systems all cause a variance in compression in the HANA DB. The best way to size a HANA DB is to do a migration.

How to use HDBAdmin to analyze performance traces in SAP HANA

Most of the time, the Plan Visualizer is sufficiently powerful to understand what is going on inside of SAP HANA when you run a query. However, sometimes you need to get to a lower level of detail to understand exactly what is going on in the calculation engine.

It is then possible to use HANA Studio to record performance traces, and analyze them with HDBAdmin. This is a fairly advanced topic, so beware!

First, let's pick a query which runs slowly. This query takes 12 seconds, which is longer than I'd like. Admittedly, it's a tough query, grouping 1.4bn transactions and counting over 2m distinct customers.

Developer's Journal: ABAP/HANA Connectivity via Secondary Database Connection

Introduction

In this first edition of this HANA Developer's Journey I barely scratched the surface on some of the ways which a developer might begin their transition into the HANA world. Today I want to describe a scenario I've been studying quite a lot in the past few days: accessing HANA from ABAP in the current state.  By this, I mean what can be built today.  We all know that SAP has some exciting plans for ABAP specific functionality on top of HANA, but what everyone might not know is how much can be done today when HANA runs as a secondary database for your current ABAP based systems.  This is exactly how SAP is building the current HANA Accelerators, so it’s worth taking a little time to study how these are built and what development options within the ABAP environment support this scenario.

LEARN WITH US : S/4 HANA Analytics!!

What it is?

S/4 HANA stands for Simple 4th Generation Business suite solutions from SAP which will run on SAP HANA. SAP HANA is one of the preferred product among the companies seeking for an optimized enterprise solution because the product has come a long way from its previous predecessors which had its transaction processing and analytical processing in different platforms, that meant more time on data output and decision making.

It is very well known as The Next Generation Business Suite and it is greatest innovation since R3 and ERP from the SAP world. It unites the software and people to build businesses to run on real-time, networked and in simple way. It has got built-in analytics for hybrid transactional and analytical applications.

SAP Hana Information Composer - for the Non-technical User - ASUG Webcast

SAP HANA Information Composer (new with SAP HANA 1.0 SP03) is a modeling tool developed specifically for the needs of non-technical users. From installation through end-user experience, you will leave this session with a comprehensive understanding of this modeling environment and how it fits in to your modeling options. You will also learn how more advanced data architects and centralized IT can benefit from and extend scenarios initiated by non-technical users in the SAP HANA Information Composer via the SAP HANA Modeler.
Agenda:

• User Experience
• Installation & Admin

SAP HANA Extended Application Services

We introduce an exciting new capability called SAP HANA Extended Application Services (sometimes referred to unofficially as XS or XS Engine). The core concept of SAP HANA Extended Application Services is to embed a full featured application server, web server, and development environment within the SAP HANA appliance itself. However this isn't just another piece of software installed on the same hardware as SAP HANA; instead SAP has decided to truly integrate this new application services functionality directly into the deepest parts of the SAP HANA database itself, giving it an opportunity for performance and access to SAP HANA differentiating features that no other application server has.

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...

Developer’s Journal: HANA Catalog Access from ABAP

Introduction

I introduced the topic of ABAP Secondary Database Connection and the various options for using this technology to access information in a HANA database from ABAP. Remember there are two scenarios where ABAP Secondary Database Connection might be used.  One is when you have data being replicated from an ABAP based application to HANA. In this case the ABAP Data Dictionary already contains the definitions of the tables which you access with SQL statements.

The other option involves using HANA to store data gathered via other means.  Maybe the HANA database is used as the primary persistence for completely new data models.  Or it could be that you just want to leverage HANA specific views or other modeled artifacts upon ABAP replicated data.  In either of these scenarios, the ABAP Data Dictionary won’t have a copy of the objects which you are accessing via the Secondary Database Connection. Without the support of the Data Dictionary, how can we define ABAP internal tables which are ready to receive the result sets from queries against such objects?

In this blog, I want to discuss the HANA specific techniques for reading the Catalog and also how the ABDC classes could be used to build a dynamic internal table which matches a HANA table or view. The complete source code discussed in this blog can be downloaded from the SCN Code Exchange.