Thoughts on SAP HANA Express

Upon my return from SAP TechEd Las Vegas last week I posted SAP TechEd & HANA Express Edition that covered the SAP HANA Express announcement.

Asked the question: 

"HANA Express appears to give individual developers the chance not just to learn but to actually build a HANA app … do you feel that ... HANA Express gives you the tools and licensing you need to take an app to market? … would this now make a viable launch point for entrepreneurial developers with fire in the belly?”

SAP TechEd & HANA Express Edition

As always it was great to catch up with lots of friends in the SAP ecosystem - and to make some new ones. The show is a highlight for the SAP techie community and this year they celebrated the 20th SAP TechEd in North America.

Generally speaking those going to their first or second TechEd thought the show was great. Those with more TechEd experience were less enthusiastic - the best adjective I can come up with to describe the show is “subdued”.

In evaluating the success of TechEd 2016 there are many facets that need to be considered - but there are two obvious issues that changed the feel of the event.

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.

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...