Head of Business Analytics & Technology
Bluefin Solutions
First Impressions on SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3, powered by SAP HANA - amazing
19 Nov 2011
Business Intelligence (BI), HANA, In-Memory, Emerging Technologies
One of my personal goals this year was to ensure that Bluefin Solutions was the first SAP Partner to showcase SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3, powered by SAP HANA. This is exactly what we will be doing this week at the SAP UK & Ireland User Group conference in Birmingham. Please visit the stand and talk to either Ian Brown or Mike Powell, who are our resident SAP HANA experts. If you want to know about the migration, then Lloyd Palfrey will be there on Sunday - he's the expert.
And so it was, that yesterday evening, we got a copy of the software to install on our SAP HANA appliance. Huge thanks to at least 10 people in SAP that helped out with this, and probably a lot more behind the scenes. Your assistance breaking down doors and making this happen is hugely appreciated. I'm not going to name names because I will inevitably forget someone - you know who you are!
What is BW on HANA?
BW on HANA is SAP's next-generation in-memory database running as the underlying for the first SAP application - SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. It replaces the underlying Microsoft, IBM or Oracle database with SAP's HANA database and is massively more performant than anything that any other vendor has to offer, because it runs in-memory.
Why would you want BW on HANA?
If you are one of 14,000 SAP NetWeaver BW customers and you have problems with report performance, flexibility or overnight schedules that run into the day and impact business operations, this product is designed specifically for you. And really, that means almost anyone, because these are typical and normal challenges associated with a Data Warehouse - SAP or non-SAP.
Getting ready for BW on HANA
For the non-technical people - this is pretty standard stuff to get your system ready to move to another platform. Just like if you wanted to move from HP to IBM or IBM to Fujitsu, which is usually done for reasons of managing the Total Cost of Ownership of your IT assets. It requires some technical expertise.
For the technical people - If you're thinking about getting ready for BW on HANA then there are a few things you have to do. First, install (or upgrade to) NetWeaver BW 7.3 SP05. Then read SAP Note 1647785 "SAP NetWeaver 7.3 BW, powered by SAP HANA - Information" and apply the corrections in SAP Note 1644137 "Composite SAP Note: BW porting in SAP HANA DB, NW 7.30 SP06".
Now you can follow the standard SAP migration process for any SAP product - there is very little different about HANA. Check database tables, indexes, data dictionary. And run the usual export process using the normal NetWeaver BW 7.3 CD. This will give you a standard SAP export. Please do all the things I said if you want to try it, they are not just best practice, they are mandatory.
Migrating to BW on HANA
From here it is easy (if you have an experienced and certified SAP Migration Consultant to hand, as I did). If you don't, then I suggest you find one! We installed the SAP HANA 1.0 SP03 database first, which takes about an hour. It's a simple process and because SAP HANA runs on an appliance, there are very few choices to make.
Next we ran the SAP installation media for SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 on HANA and pointed it to the export that we created before and pressed the go button. I think this process took about 20 minutes to happen from when we started it to when the export started.
And this is what's amazing - an hour later, it had migrated what was on the export into SAP HANA and installed the SAP application software onto the appliance. And a few minutes after that, SAP had finished installing and was running. I've seen a few SAP migrations and they are usually straightforward when well prepared (and nightmarish when ill-prepared!) - but I have never seen anything happen this fast. What's more amazing is that there were virtually no problems and the SAP HANA database remained rock stable throughout.
Bear in mind that we were already running the latest version of NetWeaver BW and I had a crack migration team that already had substantial SAP HANA database experience working on this. Your mileage may vary depending on your environment and who is doing the migration so I don't want to promise what results you might have. Obviously it also does not take into account the needs of making it live, including regression testing!
So what are the initial reactions?
First, bear in mind that this is 5 days after the product was released into Ramp-Up - that's just out of alpha and into beta for most organisations. And second, I wasn't doing a fresh install, I was using real, live, customer data - which could easily have caused problems. Both of these things would normally mean quite a lot of teething problems, and I have found none yet. I'm sure there are some and we will help SAP iron them out during the Ramp-Up program.
So take a simple example, the SGEN process, which compiles all the SAP code natively and is required for fast system operation after you install SAP. This normally takes 8-20 hours on a system this complex. On HANA: 45 minutes.
And I've not done benchmarking yet, but it is just lightening fast to use both for administration and for reporting. Everything happens at the speed of thought. It is a true pleasure, and initially it looks stable as well.
Conclusions
I've said before that this product is a no-brainer for the 14,000 SAP NetWeaver BW customers. I stand by that today, and I stand by my point that product maturity will be key to its take-up.
What changed for me today was that my initial experience suggests that the product maturity is excellent for a product at this stage. If normal SAP rules apply, the product will be in limited shipment for the next 6 months (typically) but after that, the take-up should be immense.
And if you are one of the 14,000 SAP NetWeaver BW customers, take note. This product will solve the pain that you have been feeling around data warehouses for the last 5-10 years. It's that big.
P.S. The SAP technical people like Lloyd love it too. Fast and easy to use, for administration and backups. Well done SAP.
Comments
Raj Salecha 31 Jan 2012
Thanks John for the detailed explanation and step by step real-time implementation exposure. This really helps in understanding and comparing with what actual people face on the floor. Whatever the basic document or people says , what matters is really the thing that comes under hammer on the floor and realtime. Good article and hope to see some post-implementations actual business reviews.
Regards Raj
José Alonso 13 Jan 2012
Thanks for sharing your experience.
In the examples you provide, we can see a dramatic improvement in data loads and db size reducction.
But what about actual query performance.
Do standard queries run faster with BW powered by HANA vs. standard database? How does it compares with BWA?
Regards, José
Ravindra Suvarna 12 Jan 2012
Thank you John for this wonderful article.
Looking forward to a article which highlight remodeling requirement for running BW on HANA.
Regards
Ravindra
John Appleby 05 Dec 2011
Johannes, sorry for the slow reply, I have been away.
I think if they buy the SAP Business Suite and choose to use HANA, then it depends.
As an analytics appliance, using the SAP BO-DS suite with ERP business content extractors and HANA as an analytics appliance then the answer is probably, but it depends on the complexity of the business logic you are building. Note that whilst the extractors can be reused, regular BW business content is not available in the HANA appliance.
If you're using ERP and then SAP BW, powered by HANA then the answer is definitely, to some degree, as changes are easier and faster to make with business content, and fewer physical data layers are required than before.
The license is cheaper for BW than it is for the ful fat appliance, so if what you are looking for appears close to business content, then that sounds like the sensible approach. Hope this helps!
Jonas 01 Dec 2011
Impressive!
Johannes Lombard 28 Nov 2011
Hi John,
Great article, one we are actually discussing as a BI team busy with a deployment as we speak.
Wanted to get your views on something, if you don't mind:
Q: If a net new customer buys SAP 12 months from now, and go the HANA route, are they looking at a shortened deployment duration for same scope a BW & BO deploy that they would have 12 months ago?
I guess key to the answer is whether you can still utilize all current delivered BW content when you use the modeling engine in HANA, or whether you should implement identified BW content that matches reqs closest, then before apply custom changes / appends, you migrate over to HANA, then apply changes?
Alternatively I guess it makes sense that having BW 730 on top of HANA looks exactly the same as BW 730 today, and you can still perform all the workbench functions there, in protection of the 14k current clients.
Thoughts?
Nicholas Kontopoulos 21 Nov 2011
Hi mate,
Great post and I am very excited to hear your news.
Also great to see that Blufin are continuing to be at the tip of the spear in challenging the Status Quo :).
Cheers,
Nicholas Kontopoulos
John Appleby 20 Nov 2011
Hi Rao,
Definitely - and I will get much more out over the coming weeks and months - this is just my initial reaction that I wanted to get out in the first week.
I also forgot to answer your remodelling question. I believe the answer is it's quite straightforward to remodel but I've not done it yet. I'll be sure to make sure someone writes about it.
Regards,
John
Vigneswararao 20 Nov 2011
Dear John Appleby,
Sounds great and impressive, could please come up with some presentation document with technical approach :)
Thanks
Rao
John Appleby 20 Nov 2011
Hey Derek,
I've been playing with HANA quite a bit by now as you know and the potential performance benefits are huge. I'm seeing like-for-like 1500x speed-ups compared to traditional RDBMS data marts.
On the BW side you simply don't get this kind of benefit for most activities, and that's to be expected! SGEN is 10x faster and you can expect 3-10x faster data loads.
As I said on compression you seem to get 5-10x compression for fact tables - depending on what it was stored in before. Obviously if it was stored in a columnar store like Sybase IQ, you won't get this much!
And in any case this is just my first reaction and I am blown away so far. I've no doubt that this product will need some heavy lifting to get mature enough for SAP's big customers and that's what we're here to do.
Regards,
John
John Appleby 20 Nov 2011
Hi Rao,
It's a pretty small system - 150GB down to 60GB (MSSQL compression) down to 35GB on HANA. Just a first system to get something running for the SAP User Group Conference and test the principle.
The appliance is a "Medium" 512GB HP DL580 appliance with 40 E7 cores, 512GB RAM, 2x 320GB FusionIO and 25x 146GB 15k 2.5" SAS drives in a MSA70.
Regards,
John
vigneswarara 20 Nov 2011
Good to hear that one step head.
how much data you are choosing? what is configuration system of appliance?
Please could explain, do we need any steps to migrate Classic DSO and Cube to IMDB CUbe and DSO.
thanks
Rao
John Appleby 20 Nov 2011
Hi Ali Q,
Not so much on this system because it's quite small and was already compressed with page and index compression on MSSQL 2008 R2. It was 150GB+, down to 60GB with MSSQL compression and then about 35GB in HANA.
And compression varies wildly depending on the type of table. A poor table like REPOSRC will compress from 4.2GB on MSSQL to 3.2GB on HANA because it is full of binary objects.
On the other hand NetWeaver BW fact tables compress about 10:1 - even based on MSSQL compressed tables. So if you have a 500GB fact table, expect it to compress to 50GB or thereabouts - or even better if you are not already compressing your tables in MSSQL/Oracle/DB2.
So the bigger and better maintained your BW database, the better compression you will see.
Regards,
John
Derek Loranca 20 Nov 2011
Great article, John. As a non-ERP (but BIG data) customer, I'm really glad to hear ANY real HANA performance stories. Especially from someone I trust. Definitely interested in hearing any notes on DB size reduction/compression. Cheers!
Ali Qahtani 19 Nov 2011
Thank you John for sharing this. I'm looking forward for the benchmarks. By the way, did you get a big db size reduction?
Regards,
- Ali Q.