What is SAP HANA

SAP HANA

HANA stands for high-performance analytic appliance. SAP HANA is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows HANA to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk. This allows the application to provide instantaneous results from customer transactions and data analyses.

SAP HANA is designed to process structured data from relational databases, both SAP and non-SAP, and applications and other systems rapidly. It is capable of using three styles of data replication depending on the source of the data - log-based, ETL-based and trigger-based. The relocated structured data is stored directly in memory. Because of this, data can be accessed quickly in real time by the applications that use HANA.

                                   

SAP HANA supports various use cases for real-time analytics. Few examples are:

• Monitoring and optimization of telecommunications network
• Supply chain and retail optimization
• Fraud detection and security
• Forecasting and profitability reporting
• Energy use optimization and monitoring

SAP HANA is a data warehouse appliance for processing high volumes of operational and transactional data in real-time. HANA uses in-memory analytics, an approach that queries data stored in random access memory (RAM) instead of on hard disk or flash storage.

A HANA appliance uses an SAP Sybase replication server to copy and synchronize data from an SAP data warehouse or enterprise resource planning (ERP) application in real-time.  By running in parallel to the source SAP ERP application, HANA allows business users to query large volumes of data in real-time without having to wait for scheduled reports to run.

HANA supports industry standards such as structured query language (SQL) and multi-dimensional eXpressions (MDX).  It also includes a programming component that allows a company's IT department to create and run customized applications on top of HANA.  According to SAP, HANA has the ability to scan 500 billion point of sale (POS) records in seconds. SAP HANA was previously called SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance.

What is SAP HANA