We all like reports. Reports that include graphs and pie charts are even better! One thing we don't always consider is how fresh the data in we are looking at is? In a typical Business Intelligence scenario, the data we can access is normally already a day old. For long-term planning this is probably acceptable, but nowadays is day old data really enough to be competitive? What if manufacturing efficiency suddenly drops in your factory or your online sales suddenly boom and threaten your stoke levels? Do you really want to wait until tomorrow to find that our? SAP don’t think so.

SAP HANA was developed to plug these gaps in reporting (as well as other ventures in the future). HANA stands for "High performance ANalytic Appliance". It uses custom In-Memory computing techniques to offer extremely high query performance. Unlike BWA, HANA supports SQL and MDX giving it far more flexibility. However, like BWA, HANA is an appliance, meaning it can only be ordered from and installed by specialist partners like Centiq.

Data can be loaded in to HANA in two ways. Firstly, there is the traditional ETL approach, familiar to most of us involved in analytics. The other way to load data into HANA is by real-time data replication from a supported SAP source such as ECC6. By using real-time replication, reports can be run in HANA as soon as the data is committed in ERP database. There is no delay, no waiting for overnight ETL, the data is available immediately. With this power a business are not limited to reporting on yesterday's data, the business can report on what has happened in the last minute! As the data is held in memory in the HANA appliance reports run quick, super quick in fact. The technology developed for SAP's "In Memory" computing is advanced. SAP claim "[HANA] has the ability to scan 2 million records per millisecond per core and over 10 million complex aggregations calculated on the fly per second per core".

Not every business will be want or need real-time reporting. So is HANA still relevant? The short answer is yes. Real-time reporting is the first implementation of HANA. In the future it will be possible to use HANA as the primary database in BI system, negating the need the BWA (of course, you would still need BWA if you don't use HANA as the DB). Further down the line HANA may be used as the primary database for ECC and other SAP products. This will all but eliminate database wait times on ECC systems, something that is just not possible with traditional RDBMSs.

HANA is much more than fast reporting. HANA is the start of a whole new approach to the way SAP stores and retrieves data. My tip is get used to using HANA now and expect to see it a lot more in the future.

More SAP HANA information

How fast is SAP HANA?: Click here

View the SAP HANA Overview - Click here

View the Appliance options: Click here

View the SAP HANA Customer slides: Click here

View the SAP HANA Datasheet: Click here