The growth of digital technology has made the present world more creative and dazzling. The essential features that create development in the digital world are reducing the time needed to convert the entire prototype into a product, modifying the used components, and implementing portability. One such development is SAP HANA. It is developing as an effective database management system. Let us try to understand SAP HANA in more detail.

Introduction

Our digital world is hidden with vast interfaces, databases, and high-end applications. Enhancement in the digital world possibly relies on developing its interfaces and database processing architecture and skills. Portability and speed are the primaries of this technology. Nowadays, these features are required in each product which is resulted from the IT industry.

The Deutschsprachige SAP-Anwendergruppe, German User Group (DSAG) conference on recent progress in science and technology mainly concentrates on cloud computing, SAP HANA, and analytics. Professionals have predicted that SAP HANA would have a significant role in developing the IT industry. The past decade has been particularly successful for the company, with annual revenues more than doubling over the past ten years and net profit increasing from around 1.8 billion Euros to over five billion during that same period. This rapid increase in fortune is at least partially a result of the company’s early adoption of cloud technology and the inclusion of these cloud features in the company’s products. SAP generated about 12 billion euros from its software support sector.

What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA (High-performance Analytic Appliance) is a multi-model database. It stores data in its memory instead of keeping it on a disk. The column-oriented in-memory database design allows you to run advanced analytics alongside high-speed transactions – in a single system. Why is this so important? Because it lets companies process massive amounts of data with near-zero latency, query data instantly, and become truly data-driven. 

By storing data in column-based tables in main memory and bringing online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transactional processing (OLTP) together, SAP HANA is unique and significantly faster than other database management systems (DBMS) available in the market today. SAP HANA can accelerate the calculation speed of applications by removing or reducing the undesirable processing layer identified from real-world analytics. 

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When was SAP HANA launched?

SAP HANA was launched in 2010. It is a modern and mature solution used by tens of thousands of customers around the world. But SAP HANA is not just a database. In addition to acting as a database server, it stores and retrieves data requested by applications. It offers advanced search, analytics, and data integration capabilities for all data types, including structured and unstructured. 

The history of SAP HANA

In the mid-2000s, Hasso Plattner, the co-founder of SAP was on a mission to develop a real-time database to process transactional and analytical data. SAP HANA was born in 2010, and today, more than 30000 direct customers run on this database.

2010 – In this year, SAP HANA was announced, and a pre-release version was shipped to selected customers in November. The first official version, SAP HANA 1.0, attained the first ten go-live customers.

2012 – In this year, SAP started announcing products for cloud computing with the SAP HANA Cloud PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). SAP HANA became the fastest-growing product in SAP history.

2013 – In this year, The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) service was announced, an Infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) tool that provided customers with a managed private cloud offering for SAP HANA.

2014 – In this year, SAP sets the Guinness World record for the giant data warehouse at 12.1 petabytes (PB).

2015 – In this year, SAP was recognized as a leader by Forrester in The Forrester Wave™: In-Memory Database Platforms, Q3 2015. SAP HANA 2.0 and SAP S/4HANA ERP were system explicitly written for SAP HANA are released. This introduced a whole new set of users to the database. 

2016 – In this year, SAP HANA 2.0 general availability and launched SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse solution.

2017 – In this year, SAP HANA was recognized as the number one leader in the new Forrester Wave™: Translytical Data Platforms, Q4 2017 – SAP HANA is a unified and integrated data platform that simultaneously supports many workloads, including transactional, operational, and analytical, in real-time.

2018 – By this year, SAP becomes the first significant database optimized for Intel® Optane™ persistent memory

2019 – In this year, SAP HANA Cloud was announced as SAP’s next-generation Data Platform as a Service (DPaaS). SAP HANA runs on all SAP’s hyper scaler partners’ platforms. 

2020 – In this year, SAP HANA completed ten successful years and launched SAP HANA Cloud to deliver the next generation of innovation of SAP HANA

SAP HANA Architecture

SAP HANA’s in-memory, column-oriented architecture is built for fast queries and high-speed transactions. It also includes database management, application development, advanced analytical processing, and flexible data virtualization.

Database design –

• In-memory, columnar, parallel processing database – SAP HANA runs transactional and analytical workloads using a single data instance on a single platform. It stores data in high-speed memory, organizes it in columns and partitions, and distributes it among multiple servers. This delivers faster queries more efficiently than aggregate data and avoids costly full-table scans.  
• ACID compliance – SAP HANA helps ensure compliance with all requirements for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) standards. 
• Multi-tenancy – SAP HANA allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system, sharing the same memory and processors. Each tenant database is fully isolated with its own database users, catalogue, repository, data files, and log files for maximum security and control.  
• Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support – In SAP HANA, various software solutions manage multi-temperature data ranging from hot to warm to cold to optimize performance and cost of storage. SAP HANA’s native storage extension is a built-in capability to smartly manage data between memory and persistent storage, such as the SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake.
• Scaling – Supports terabytes of data in a single server and scales further by implementing a shared-nothing architecture across multiple servers in a cluster. Distributes large tables across these servers automatically based on rules.

Database management

• Data modelling – SAP HANAs in memory technology has enabled application developers/modelers to rethink traditional modelling using a virtual data model. 
• Stored procedures – SAP HANA has a native language to build stored procedures and uses advanced capabilities to create complex logic that runs inside the database. 
• Administration – SAP HANA provides comprehensive administration tools for various platform lifecycle, performance, and management operations and automation, such as start, stop, restart, back up, and recover. 
• Security – SAP HANA has unique real-time data anonymization capabilities to extract value from data while protecting privacy.  Robust authentication, user management, and authorization protocols help ensure that users access only the data they have permission to see and handle.
• High availability and disaster recovery – SAP HANA supports high availability and disaster recovery to meet a broad range of service levels through an array of techniques like backup, storage mirroring, synchronous, asynchronous, and multitarget system replication.

Application development

• SAP HANA extended application services – This is a built-in application server that enables development of services, such as REST and OData, as well as Web-based applications that can run on premises, in the cloud, and on mobile devices. 
• Responsive web applications – SAP HANA includes an HTML5 and JavaScript framework based on the SAP Fiori UI that develops responsive Web applications. These applications run on any device and adapt automatically to screen size, delivering a consistent look and feel across all touch points.
• Client access – SAP HANA provides many client libraries for accessing SAP HANA from other application platforms and languages such as JavaScript, Python, R, Java and Go to name a few
• Application lifecycle management – SAP HANA builds and package applications, transport them from development to test to production, and deploy and upgrade them.
• Application development tools – Offers lightweight development tools for data modeling and app development on-premises and in the Cloud.  Alternatively, the ABAP programming language includes optimized features to build extensions to SAP applications.

Advanced analytics

• Search – Use SQL to locate text quickly across multiple columns and textual content. Run both full-text and advanced fuzzy searches for numerous languages.
• Spatial processing – SAP HANA provides native support for spatial data types and spatial functions. Spatial processing is supported by SQL through open standards to store, query, and access location-enabled content. Learn more about SAP HANA spatial processing. 
• Graph -These stores and processes highly connected data using a property graph. Combine graph data processing with additional advanced analytical processing functionality in SAP HANA, such as text, predictive, spatial, document (JSON) and standard relational data structures.
• Streaming analytics – This store, query, and apply machine learning (ML) to streaming data to discover trends over a period. These data sources include sensors, plant equipment, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices that arrive in a time-series format

Data Virtualization

• Data integration and replication – SAP HANA offers comprehensive features to handle all data integration scenarios. These include ETL (extract, transform, load) and ELT as well as real-time data replication, bulk-load processing, data transformation, and built-in data quality and enrichment services.
• Data federation – It performs queries on remote data sources – such as external cloud-native sources, Apache Hadoop, and other databases – in real time with data federation. 
• Caching – Ability to cache data to optimize federated queries against remote sources of data. Control which sources and structures this is applied to and how/when the cache is refreshed. 

Major Benefits of SAP HANA

The SAP HANA database offers many more benefits than just storing data, serving it, and providing a single source of truth. The major benefits of SAP HANA, both on-premises and with SAP HANA Cloud include,

• Complete: It includes database services, advanced analytical processing, application development, and data integration. 
• Fast: It responds to queries in less than a second even in complex and large production applications.
• Versatile: It supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing and many data types.
• Efficient: It provides a smaller data footprint with no data duplication, advanced compression, and reducing data silos.
• Powerful: It rapidly queries large datasets with a massively parallel processing (MPP) database
• Scalable: It easily scales for data volume and concurrent users across a distributed environment
• Flexible: It deploys in a public or private cloud, in multiple clouds, on-premise, or in a hybrid scenario
• Simple: It provides a single gateway to all your data with advanced data virtualization
• Intelligent: It augments applications and analytics with built-in machine learning (ML)
• Secure: It offers comprehensive data and application security, secure setup, and more

Why is SAP HANA important?

Many organizations have large amounts of data that essentially sits in a data warehouse and provides no value, amounting to terabytes of untapped potential that could be used to accelerate business impact and provide more excellent customer value.

With its lightning-fast, in-memory processing and real-time data analytics powered by machine learning, SAP HANA harnesses a company’s data and puts it to work for them, streamlining processes, eliminating errors, and providing benefits to clients, customers, and employees. Enhance customer satisfaction with up-to-the-minute product availability that can be accessed on any smartphone.

SAP HANA keep employees happy with simplified accounting processes, instant benefits or vacation time updates, and enhanced collaboration platforms. And help managers and executives plan with predictive analytics that can forecast supply chain issues, manage cash flow, and integrate team workflows for heightened efficiency.

Why SAP HANA can be the best choice for your career?

Anyone wishing or preparing for a career in SAP HANA, whether a data analyst or data scientist, should know that SAP HANA is an excellent career option and it offers tremendous career opportunities. Currently, SAP works is the most prominent performer in the data analysis and business intelligence fields.

A complete SAP HANA course programs provide a complete understanding of all the essential skills and make you a full-packed SAP professional. After the course completion, your knowledge and skills will be in huge demand in several domains. If you are interested in data with SAP HANA, it is recommended to go with SAP Business Object and SAP BI/BW, which provide unlimited advantages. You will also learn about data replication, warehousing concepts, provisioning, data connectivity, real-time data analysis, and business intelligence techniques.

SAP HANA professionals with in-depth knowledge, solid fundamentals, and good experience can utilize a database management tool; this helps them get a good salary package and reach a new elevation in this domain. SAP HANA involves an excellent career track because SAP includes infinite existing clients, as much more is expected to move to HANA in the future. Thus, it is expected that there will be a massive demand for SAP HANA experts in the future.

Additionally, the HANA architecture supports new prerequisites and business innovation by providing speed, scalability, and functionality. Therefore, candidates interested in learning HANA reporting and modeling will observe a fantastic career variation. SAP HANA information modeling, also known as HANA Data modeling, is an essential part of the application development of HANA. It helps to create modeling views on the top of database tables.

Why differentiates SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is fundamentally different in its design. In SAP HANA, the entire data is stored in in-memory, in a compressed and columnar format. As HANA is very fast, it does not require indexes, sums, aggregates, and materialized views; this decreases the database impression by 95 %. In SAP HANA, all the calculations are performed on-demand and in the main memory. With the help of this feature, companies can execute OLTP and analytics applications in parallel without any restrictions.

SAP HANA develops answers for entire problems related to columnar databases together with concurrency and row-level update and inserts performance; this is one of the essential benefits of SAP HANA. Additionally, SAP added a set of engines with HANA to provide data virtualization, functionality, search, text analysis, graph, and the web. It also supports open standards such as JSON, REST, ODBO, JDBC, MDX, and ODBC. It offers greater functionality like IBM software track or the whole Oracle in a single database.

Efficiency of SAP HANA

• SAP HANA is 3600 xs faster than traditional databases
• SAP HANA answers queries in less than 1 second
• SAP HANA can do 3.5 billion scans per second per core
• SAP HANA can do15 million aggregations per second per core

Applications of SAP HANA

Many of SAP’s flagship products run on SAP HANA. Our extensive network of SAP partners and customers has developed custom solutions that leverage the power of SAP HANA to meet their specific business needs. Some solutions powered by SAP HANA are given below:

• SAP S/4HANA – Run your mission-critical operations in real-time with a complete, modular cloud ERP system powered by SAP HANA, with AI and analytics capabilities.

• SAP Data Intelligence – Connect to data from anywhere. Bring together data orchestration, metadata management, and robust data pipelines with advanced machine learning. 

• SAP Data Warehouse Cloud – Gain valuable insights from trusted data using data integration from different sources under a standard semantic layer built on SAP HANA Cloud.

• SAP Analytics Cloud – Access business intelligence, predictive and augmented analytics, and enterprise planning in a single solution – powered by SAP HANA.

What is the difference between SAP and SAP HANA?

What is an in-memory database?

An in-memory database (IMDB) is a type of database that stores data in a computer’s main memory (RAM) instead of on traditional disks or solid-state drives (SSD). While most databases today have added more in-memory capabilities, they are still disk-based storage databases first. SAP HANA was built from the ground up to first work with data in memory and leverage other storage mechanisms to balance performance and cost. Retrieval from memory is much faster than from a disk or SSD, resulting in split-second response times.

In-memory databases are often used for applications that require top speed and the ability to handle large spikes in traffic – such as telecommunications networks and banking systems. In the last 10 years, mainly due to advancements in multi-core processors and less expensive RAM, companies have started to use in-memory databases for a broader range of applications, including real-time analytics and predictive modeling, customer experience management, logistics, and much more. 

SAP HANA Training and Certification

Nowadays, many educational organizations provide independent learning and training programs in the SAP HANA domain because top IT companies worldwide want to hire experts who have completed such training programs to meet their future demands.

Most of the training institute offers SAP HANA training in two different ways; the conventional classroom method, which provides certification training with an instructor live.

Another approach is the online training technique. The students can learn the SAP HANA skills online in SAP HANA online training. This type of training is more convenient and familiar nowadays. This method includes e-learning through an online institution paid by a subscription. With the help of SAP HANA training, the candidates can access the system and enhance their employable skills.

Conclusion

SAP HANA provides various benefits, such as extensive performance improvements, reduced complexity, reduced functioning costs, and other significant advantages. SAP HANA database can analyse the data efficiently stored in the real-time setup. It also evaluates massive data from various databases with much accuracy and speed. Due to these benefits, SAP HANA is seeing a substantial growth, demand, and approval in ints customer base. SAP consultants and integrators should anticipate demand for HANA expertise in the short and long term. SAP HANA professionals are in great demand in the existing job market and thus can get a high salary range.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the full form of SAP HANA? 

The full form of HANA is High-Performance Analytic Appliance. SAP is the name of the company.

2. What is SAP Hana?

SAP HANA (High-performance Analytic Appliance) is a multi-model database. It stores data in its memory instead of keeping it on a disk.

3. Why is SAP HANA best for your career?

SAP HANA equips you with features like data replication, warehousing concepts, provisioning, data connectivity, real-time data analysis, and business intelligence techniques. Aspiring professionals can utilize a database management tool to get a good salary package and reach new heights in their careers.

4. What is SAP HANA SQL data profiling?

SQL Data Profiling in SAP HANA is used to understand and analyse data from multiple data sources. It removes incorrect, incomplete data and prevent data quality problems before they are loaded in data warehouse.

5. What is the SAP HANA platform edition?

SAP HANA platform edition consists of SAP HANA Database, SAP HANA Client, SAP HANA Studio, SAP HANA XS, SAP HANA Advanced Data Processing, and SAP HANA Spatial

6. Is SAP HANA free?

Yes, SAP HANA is absolutely free.

7. Is SAP HANA easy to learn?

With proper training, SAP HANA is easy to learn.

8. Does SAP HANA have a good future scope?

Yes, SAP HANA have a promising future scope due to its increasing demand and its expanding abilities.

9. Where can I learn SAP HANA?

There are many educational organizations as well as online training programs providing independent learning and training programs in SAP HANA. You can learn at your own pace and become a pro in SAP HANA domain.

10.  Is SAP HANA a database?

Yes. SAP HANA is a column-oriented, in-memory relational database.

Barry Lachey

Barry Lachey is a Professional Editor at Zobuz. Previously He has also worked for Moxly Sports and Network Resources “Joe Joe.” he is a graduate of the Kings College at the University of Thames Valley London. You can reach Barry via email or by phone.