Head of Business Analytics & Technology
Bluefin Solutions
Update III: The SAP HANA FAQ - answering key SAP In-Memory questions
28 May 2012
Business Intelligence (BI), Business Objects, HANA, In-Memory, SAP NetWeaver Platform, Consumer Business
It's now a whole year since SAP HANA went into General Availability (GA). And every time I blink, this FAQ is out of date. If only it crowd sourced its information for me! Since then there have been 2 more major revisions and some 28 minor revisions. So it's time for the latest update and I hope you enjoy it. It's not an official SAP FAQ, but it is information pulled together from industry experts from in and outside of Bluefin Solutions who have worked with and know the product intimately.
1. SAP HANA overview
1.1 What is SAP HANA?
SAP HANA is a general purpose and ANSI standards-compliant in-memory database. Because of its design it allows transactional and OLAP reporting in a single system, which makes it simpler, and much faster, than traditional RDBMS systems like Oracle.
1.2 Is SAP HANA an appliance?
SAP HANA comes shipped as a pre-configured appliance from your hardware vendor and the license is bought from SAP.
SAP HANA is an analytics appliance that consists of certified hardware, an In Memory DataBase (IMDB) an Analytics Engine and some tooling for getting data in and out of HANA. You build the logic and structures yourself, and use a tool e.g. SAP BusinessObjects, to visualise or analyse data.
1.3 How is SAP HANA licensed?
With SAP HANA, you pay based on the size of productive usage. All test, demo, HA and DR licenses are included in this price and there are no hidden extras like CPU or user licenses. It is one simple price based on appliance size. There are volume discounts so as you buy HANA, the price decreases.
SAP HANA is priced by the 64GB unit right now, and there is some discounting based on volume. As usual with SAP licenses, it's best to contact your account exec directly and talk to them. The minimum purchase amount is currently 64GB, and the smallest appliance is 128GB, which is upgradeable to 256GB. This means if you buy 64GB today, you can easily incrementally expand up to 256GB.
Note that Steve Lucas from SAP has given some HANA prices for BW to the market - What Oracle won't tell you about SAP HANA - saying that it can cost as little as €13k per 64GB unit.
1.4 Why is SAP HANA versionless and what is innovation without disruption?
SAP HANA was originally going to be numbered 1.0, 1.2, 1.5 and 2.0 and you will see this in some early literature. But what SAP have done is really interesting: they have removed the versions and provide innovations automatically when you update HANA.
For the purposes of information and marketing, SAP HANA has patches - SP01 which was the ramp-up, SP02 which was the generally available version, SP03 which provided support for BW and SP04 which provides support for Text Analytics and High Availability. But the patches are just to let people know about the new features - there is no release of SP04.
But the reality is that SAP HANA only comes released in Revisions. And for example, Revision 28 is SP04. So when last week, I had all our SAP HANA systems updated to SAP HANA Revision 28, we got the innovations from SP04 included. And this update takes about 10 minutes and can be done online in High Availability environments.
This is what SAP call innovation without disruption and it seems to work really nicely.
1.5 What are the key benefits of SAP HANA Patches?
SAP HANA SP01 (Revision 10) is the initial release of SAP HANA to ramp-up.
SAP HANA SP02 (Revision 12) is the general-availability release of SAP HANA to the market.
SAP HANA SP03 (Revision 20) brought:
- Support for the SAP NetWeaver BW database
- Information Composer
SAP HANA SP04 (Revision 28) brought:
- Loading Data from Flat Files (CSV, XLS, XLSX) including automatic table creation in HANA Studio
- Enhancements for Attribute/Calculation Views, Usability, Security, Multi-language and technical.
- High Availability
- ETL-based Data Acquisition by SAP HANA Direct Extractor Connection
- Predictive Analytics Library (PAL)
- R Programming Language Integration
1.6 What is SAP NetWeaver BW on HANA?
SAP now supports SAP HANA as the underlying database for its first Business Suite product, the NetWeaver BW Data Warehouse. I have broken this out into a separate article - The SAP BW on HANA FAQ
1.7 What is SAP ERP on HANA?
SAP planned from the start to allow customers to run their ERP or Business Suite on SAP HANA. However, out the box, ERP on HANA does not provide the same level of benefits that BW on HANA does. This is because ERP is predominately transactional (OLTP) and SAP HANA does not optimise large transactional volumes to the extent that it does the OLAP functions of SAP BW. It will still run faster than ERP on Oracle or DB2, but not 100 or 1000 times faster.
SAP ERP is not optimised for any particular database and this was a deliberate decision. ERP basely makes use of database stored procedures. However, to optimise ERP on HANA it is necessary to push the logic down into the database and make use of the SAP HANA stored procedure language SQLScript. This work is in progress.
In addition, SAP wanted to prove the reliability of SAP HANA and its ability to support business critical applications. From a technology perspective, it is already possible to run the Business Suite on IMDB and SAP has trialled moving some large databases into HANA already. In fact, it runs its own ERP system, affectionately called "NSP" by employees, on HANA in parallel.
SAP ERP on HANA is expected to be released into ramp-up in Q4 2012. CRM, SCM and PLM will follow.
1.8 What is SAP HANA great at?
The best thing that HANA brings to the table is the ability to aggregate large data volumes in near real-time - and to have the data updated in near real-time. SAP's demos show hundreds of billions of records of data being aggregated in a matter of seconds. SAP has built a set of Analytics Apps on top of HANA and this are set to be great point use cases to get customers up and running quickly.
The really great SAP HANA apps that have been created mix three big performance improvements. First, the performance of in-memory analytics, second, an inefficient design and third, a change in process that allows further improvements. This is what SAP's CTO Vishal Sikka affectionally calls the "100,000x club".
In addition, SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3, powered by SAP HANA looks like it will be a no-brainer for the majority of SAP's 14,000 BW customers. The improvements in performance and flexibility it allows resolve many of the classic data warehouse problems that have plagued the market for 20 years.
1.9 Where might SAP HANA not provide a benefit?
SAP HANA improves the biggest bottleneck that exists in standard database platforms - the spinning disks. In-memory technology is typically 100-1000x faster than disk for this reason.
The biggest examples of where I have seen SAP HANA not able to provide a benefit is where it is compared feature-function as a replacement to an existing transactional system.
The reason for this is because SAP HANA provides opportunities to simplify the architecture of the existing solution and simply replacing the database does not provide this opportunity.
For example, SAP HANA does in this instance not require a separate data warehouse for analytics - you can just build real-time virtual OLAP functions on top of your transactional OLTP store. So, the analytics functions are real-time where they were replicated before, and what's more because of the high analytical performance of SAP HANA, they are likely to be massively faster.
1.10 How does SAP HANA compare to Oracle Exalytics?
This is a perfect example of the simplification example I gave in the last question. With Oracle, you need to build your transactional database in Exadata, then you replicate this into the Exalytics Times-Ten database for reporting and into Essbase for forecasting.
By contrast if you use SAP HANA, you store the information once in the SAP HANA appliance. From that one store you can do transaction processing, analytical reporting, forecasting and predictives. With HANA you are not moving information around the whole time and this simplifies the solution, enables the solution to be more easily changed and more agile. And you do not pay a performance penalty because everything happens in-memory.
1.11 What happens if hardware or power fails?
Intel has a comprehensive collection of Reliability, Availability and Scalability features in their SAP HANA hardware and this includes predictive memory failure, fault tolerance and recovery of failed memory. This is designed to avoid hardware failure but obviously hardware does fail from time to time.
In case of hardware failure, SAP HANA supports fully Highly Available scenarios and standby nodes. If one node fails, another will replace it.
It also supports Disaster Recovery using disk mirroring to an alternative location, in case of power failure in the main site.
In addition, SAP HANA writes a copy of what is happening in memory to disk, using a combination of save-points and log files. If the power goes out, it will reload the last save point and then apply the log files when you switch it back on.
1.12 What does SAP HANA cost?
SAP HANA is priced by the 64GB unit right now, and there is some discounting based on volume. As usual with SAP licenses, it's best to contact your account exec directly and talk to them. The minimum purchase amount is currently 64GB, and the smallest appliance is 128GB, which is upgradeable to 256GB. This means if you buy 64GB today, you can easily incrementally expand up to 256GB.
Note that Steve Lucas from SAP has given some HANA prices for BW to the market - What Oracle won't tell you about SAP HANA - saying that it can cost as little as €13k per 64GB unit.
1.13 Why is SAP HANA so fast?
Regular RDBMS technologies put the information on spinning plates of iron (hard disks) from which the information is retrieved. HANA stores information in electronic memory, which is some 50x faster (depending on how you calculate). HANA stores a copy on magnetic disk, in case of power failure or the like. In addition, most SAP systems have the database on one system and a calculation engine on another, and they pass information between them. With HANA, this all happens within the same machine.
1.14 Does SAP HANA replace Oracle?
It's the elephant in the room, but once the Business Suite runs on IMDB, Oracle won't be needed any more by SAP customers who purchase HANA. This doesn't affect anything in the short term because many of those people buying HANA today will still need an Oracle ERP system.
However if you run an Oracle or DB2 data mart that performs poorly, you could replace this outright with SAP HANA and that would allow you to actually eliminate some licenses today. The same applies if you buy your SAP BW licenses from another database vendor directly.
1.15 What compression can I expect as compared to alternatives?
The answer is it really depends on the number of unique values in your data. The fewer unique values, the better the compression. If you have raw flat files or uncompressed databases like DB2 or Oracle then I generally see 10x compression to be a good start point.
If you are using DB2 or Oracle compression then you can expect that to reduce to 5x compression with HANA in an average scenario.
Note that this is missing the point because HANA allows simplification. In one customer I have dealt with, they had 27TB of SAP BW database, but 20TB of this was aggregates and indexes used to improve performance. So when the database was moved to SAP HANA, they started with 7TB and got 5x compression. In real life this means compression of 27TB down to 1.5TB or 18:1.
1.16 What is the wider market opportunity for in-memory technologies?
I think that this is the biggest challenge that SAP HANA provides today: because it simplifies and changes the way in which computer solutions can be designed, which requires a change in the design philosophy of computer systems. I have been talking to a number of people that see the potential and the key is this: you move all your data into one place. You transact, report, plan, forecast and consolidate on a single version of the truth.
If you can make the mental jump of what that would mean to your organisation then you can see the potential.
2. SAP HANA database hardware
2.1 What hardware is supported right now?
I have broken out the SAP HANA Hardware guide into a separate FAQ - The SAP HANA Hardware FAQ
There is a supported hardware list on SAP's website at: http://service.sap.com/pam (login required).
2.2 Why doesn't SAP HANA run on blades?
Running SAP HANA on blades is only relevant in multi-node systems. SAP HANA does run on blades from Cisco and HP. Fujitsu and IBM currently do not have a blade solution and IBM have stated that it is not their current strategy. This is because their GPFS filesystem requires local disk storage in the system and blades cannot hold this.
2.3 Does SAP make its own SAP HANA hardware?
Yes, but only in the labs so far. There are no public plans to compete against IBM/HP/Dell in this space, but it may make sense for SAP to enter the appliance market, especially in the context of Data Centres and even more so in the context of the SAP Business byDesign cloud offering, which will run on HANA.
2.4 How big does SAP HANA scale?
The largest certified appliance is 16TB and there are 100TB appliances in the lab. Remember that you do get compression on this so this is equivalent to 160TB of raw data for a 16TB appliance.
But for "big data" fans, HANA currently only scales to the small-end of Big Data, which refers to the kind of huge datasets that FaceBook or Google have to store - not Terabytes, but rather Petabytes. These volumes remain the domain of solutions like Hadoop.
That said, given that we moved from 1TB to 16TB certified appliances in the last year, you can expect by 2013 for much larger appliances to be certified.
3. Technical FAQ
3.1 What source databases does SAP HANA support in real-time?
There are two mechanisms that HANA supports for near-real-time data loads. First is the Sybase Replication Server (SRS), which works with SAP or non-SAP source systems running on Microsoft, IBM or Oracle databases. This was expected to be the most common mechanism for SAP data sources but there remain some license challenges around replicating data out of Microsoft and Oracle databases, depending on how you license the database layer of SAP. If you buy your database license direct from the vendor then you are fine, but if you buy it through SAP then you may have a restricted license that does not allow for usage of SRS.
For those scenarios, SAP have a second choice of replication mechanism called System Landscape Transformation (SLT). SLT is also near-real-time and works from a trigger from the SAP Business Suite products. This is both database-independent and pretty neat, because it allows for application-layer transformations and therefore greater flexibility than the SRS model. Note that SLT has now been extended to work with non-SAP source systems.
In addition there is a new model, the Direct Extractor Connection. This provides a means to work with Business Content DataSources (DXC), which send data from an SAP Business Suite system to SAP HANA. With DXC, the Business Content extractors are redirected, and instead of flowing into SAP Business Warehouse, extracted data flows into SAP HANA directly.
SRS has additional restrictions which are worth bearing on mind. It can only replicate Unicode data and does not support IBM DB2 compressed tables at this time.
3.2 What source databases does SAP HANA support for batch loads?
If you use SAP BusinessObjects Data Services 4.0 for bulk loads then pretty much anything. BO-DS is a very flexible Extract, Transform & Load tool that supports many databases. Data Services was previously called Data Integrator, and was previously called Acta, prior to being acquired by Business Objects.
You can reasonably load into HANA using Data Services every 10 minutes and Data Services allows for excellent flexibility because you can take care of complex business transformations including e.g. address verification outside of HANA, which may allow simplified modelling within HANA.
I hear that SAP plan to open up a certification for third-party ETL tools later in 2012. However there are plans to move the Data Services ETL engine into SAP HANA which would allow transformations to happen in-memory. This would provide a significant benefit over any other ETL tool.
3.3 What BI Platforms does SAP HANA support?
SAP HANA supports the ODBC, JDBC and MDX standards for BI (or other connections). Today, only the SAP BI4 suite and Analysis for Excel client are supported.
However I have tested a number of different tools on top of HANA and they generally work well - including the SAP Mobility Platform for real-time replication to mobile devices. Again there is set to be a certification process starting later in 2012 that will allow third-party vendors to certify their software.
4. Follow-ons, corrections & credits
This is a work in progress and your help correcting me, clarifying some things I may have not explained so well or even just asking a question that I haven't covered would be really useful for the wider market. Let me know and I'll expand this as the months go on!
I'd like to particularly thank Vitaliy Sygyzmundovych (@Sygyzmundovych), Jon Reed (@jonerp) and Vijay Vijaysankar (@vijayasankarv) who have given invaluable input into this. But also to Ethan Jewett, Karin Tillotson, Mike Bestvina, Danny Rhode and others.
Comments
Sandip Basu Mallik 18 Jun 2013
Hi ,
Can we install SAP HANA Platform Ed. 1.0 SPS05 (SAP HANA DB 1.00.53) in window 7 enterprise edition?
I mean i want to install Hana DB in window 7.
Thanks and regards
Sandip
suntide 08 Nov 2012
Being InMemory database SAP Keeps all data in RAM, in this regard, I have few question
1. Is that Required to keep all datain RAM even though it it not required for reporting( Historical Data). Is there way we can keep selective data in Main memory and rest all data on Disc ? If is possible how it is possible.
2. HANA being compressed database, is that required to keep all data into Disc from the Operation systems. can it be option to Archieving and flushed back to operational system if needed. if so what is process or methodology.
Lloyd Palfrey 01 Aug 2012
Hi Timi,
At the moment the only supported method for backup and recovery is the built in HANA capabilities. These tools allow you to backup or restore HANA via HANA studio or via an SQL statement. You can schedule backups by creating a small script to execute the SQL backup command.
Log backups are set by default to run every 5 minutes but can be adjusted to meet your requirements. In most cases the log backup runs every 5-30minuntes to an NFS location.
In the future Vendor specific backup solutions will be supported. I know for example that IBM are currently testing GPFS snapshotting with HANA.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Lloyd Palfrey
Timi Odeneye 01 Aug 2012
Hi John,
Thanks for the information, Do you know if SAP HANA Support Netbackup or IBM Networker for Backup and recovery
John Appleby 16 Jul 2012
HANA Edge Edition is designed to be sold to the SME market and comes in 32Gb and 64GB versions. It has some limitations - for example only one source system can be connected. The price point is €40k for a 32GB license.
Functionally, it is the same as HANA Platform (i.e. without SRS realtime replication). The hardware vendors have a 2U Intel-based server.
Here is the SAP press release:
http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/press.epx?PressID=18243
Gaurav Patankar 16 Jul 2012
Hi John,
A very nice discourse and it answers almost all the questions that pops in one's mind initially.
I have a question about HANA edge edition.
What exactly is edge edition in HANA context?
Tried looking for the same in service market place but was not lucky enough.
Thanks.
John Appleby 11 Jul 2012
Glad you enjoyed
1) ERP Accelerators use regular SLT and only accelerate reads for this exact reason. Updates happen to the primary DB and are replicated over to SAP HANA.
2) Column - which is pretty much the same for all database objects on SAP HANA. Only fast moving DB objects like RFC tables use the row format, and those would not be good candidates to be accelerated using the ERP accelerator anyhow.
3) The standard accelerators just accelerate DB reads so there aren't additional flows added. However I have implemented scenarios where we added SQLScript into SAP HANA and ran this via the secondary database. This allows much more complex logic and heavy lifting to be pushed down into HANA.
4) I am seeing SQLScript used in some accelerator scenarios and in a number of analytic scenarios where complex calculations are required. So far I've only come across R in predictive analytics scenarios using SAP Predictive Analysis but it is likely that its use will grow as the number of supported libraries increases.
Mike Hill 11 Jul 2012
John, great blog .... coupdl questions about how Hana stores data:
1) does the ECC Accelerators store data in the same format as a normal SLT pull? Reason I'm asking is I thought that the acceleraotrs would need to do updates, i.e. record locking ... and not the same as SLT does which are inserts that have timestamps.
2) when we do a SLT pull from a ECC table to HANA does this get stored in a row or col format?
3) after we pull data to ECC via SLT do you normally see additional transformations added (i.e. business rules added) in the flow creating additional tables or are these just all table joins and views on top of each other?
4) how do you see scripting being used (sql and R) in HANA, it is just for peculiar apps of do you see it commonly used for reporting purposes.
I thank you for your questions and hope I didn;t ask too many.
Mike
Mike Hill 11 Jul 2012
John, great blog .... coupdl questions about how Hana stores data:
1) does the ECC Accelerators store data in the same format as a normal SLT pull? Reason I'm asking is I thought that the acceleraotrs would need to do updates, i.e. record locking ... and not the same as SLT does which are inserts that have timestamps.
2) when we do a SLT pull from a ECC table to HANA does this get stored in a row or col format?
3) after we pull data to ECC via SLT do you normally see additional transformations added (i.e. business rules added) in the flow creating additional tables or are these just all table joins and views on top of each other?
4) how do you see scripting being used (sql and R) in HANA, it is just for peculiar apps of do you see it commonly used for reporting purposes.
I thank you for your questions and hope I didn;t ask too many.
Mike
Richard Muirhead 23 Jun 2012
John - great article. A couple of points:
1.12 The minimum 1-block HANA license purchase is only after an initial 2-block purchase. You cannot buy 1 block and run it on a 2-block server.
@Vitaliy - your comment on "Why HANA is not offered on blades?". It may have been SAPs opinion that 90% of data would fit in <1TB, but it's certainly not CISCO's experience for providing HANA Servers. Their customers are focusing on servers at 4TB+. just an FYI.
@Glenn Chung - CO-PA RDS is $8,500 and includes materials for: Training, Sample Data, Data Model and the Accplication
John Appleby 14 Jun 2012
Hey Ashok,
I presume you're referring to this for a BW on HANA scenario. If so, this is covered in my BW on HANA FAQ, but the short version is that HANA is Unicode-only, though this shouldn't matter to you:
http://www.bluefinsolutions.com/insights/blog/the_sap_bw_on_hana_faq/
What version of SAP BW do I need to be on?
You need to be running SAP NetWeaver BW 7.3 Unicode. This is a pretty straightforward upgrade from SAP NetWeaver BW 7.0 that can be done at the same time as the migration if required.
If you're referring to some other HANA Enterprise scenario then it depend on what replication technology you are using.
If you are using Data Services or SLT then there's no problem - they can do the Unicode conversion during the transformation process and your source system can remain non-Unicode.
If you are using the Replication Server then your source system must be Unicode.
Regards,
John
Ashok Gupta 14 Jun 2012
Hi,
Does HANA requires unicode activation. Currently we are on NON-Unicode and don't intend to repoert in other languages also.
Thanks
Ashok
Faraz Khan 30 May 2012
Hi John,
Thanks a lot!
It's a very nice and informative FAQ article.
I have two questions:
Q1: Which programming language has been used to develop HANA?
Q2: Is there any version available to download for personal use?
Regards,
Faraz
Suneet Agera 24 May 2012
Hi John,
Nice article. Just wanted to point out section 1.11. You have mentioned "This doesn't affect anything in the short term because many of those people buying HANA today will still need an Oracle ERP system.". I think you mean Oracle database instead of Oracle ERP system.
Regards
Suneet
Javed C 08 May 2012
Thanks a lot of so much info on SAP HANA.
I tried to search on net regarding learning SAP HANA, can ypu please let me know from where one can learn SAP HANA.
Javed C
DJ Everette 08 May 2012
SAP HANA NEEDS AN IMPLEMENTATION ROADMAP. Anyone have one? I am trying to customize an MS Project Plan for SAP Implementation including HANA and could use some help.
DJE
DJ Everette 08 May 2012
SAP HANA NEEDS AN IMPLEMENTATION ROADMAP. Anyone have one? I am trying to customize an MS Project Plan for SAP Implementation including HANA and could use some help.
DJE
Guy Tew 07 Mar 2012
John, I assume in 1.7 you meant 'efficient' design? Wouldn't want to get people's hopes up about what HANA can achieve ;-)
Antonio Caldas 16 Feb 2012
Hi Josh.
Thanks for this complete information on HANA. It is really a great article.
Regards
Antonio Caldas
Vitaliy @Sygyzmundovych 10 Feb 2012
> I heard that Hana does not use indexes? Is this true? I thought that in-memory systems would use the new T-Tree index.
Mike, you raised an interesting question indeed. Firstly, there is a split between column-based and row-based data stores. Afaik, T-Tree is used by TimesTen (Oracle), which was row-based IMDB. I frankly do not know what SAP is using for indexes on row-based tables in HANA db (HDB). Secondly, column-based tables in HDB are legacy of TREX, so their structure is inverted index itself. But because HDB is SQL database it has table indexes concept, which are still used, e.g. in case of secondary indexes on BW objects' tables. And again - interesting question what structure is used in that case: B-Tree, T-Tree or something else.
Vitaliy @Sygyzmundovych 08 Feb 2012
Maloof, you need to start from the differentiator that HANA has been created with the thought of supporting traditional SAP products. E.g. it has the same "Client" concept as it is available in NetWeaver ABAP. I do not think you can find Coherence or Gigaspace been certified for use with SAP. So, in a nutshell: say "HANA" think "SAP".
Maloof 08 Feb 2012
how does HANA compare to other In-Memory data management solutions such as Coherence and Gigaspace. Is this a replacement or an enhancement
Rama Shankar - Atlanta, GA 07 Feb 2012
John, this is a great book. It is a must read for Data Architects who are moving towards modelling in-memory computing solutions. Thanks for sharing this chapter...from the book.
John Appleby 07 Feb 2012
HANA 1.0 SP03 (previously known as HANA 1.5) is currently in RampUp. Solution Validation (general release) is expected in H1 of this year. Hopefully soon! It's pretty fantastic stuff and surprisingly mature.
You are right that HANA 1.0 SP03 is required if you would like to use HANA as a database for a NetWeaver BW ABAP environment.
@Mike
HANA doesn't really have a concept of indexes per se, because every element is stored in a row- or column-store depending on the table definition. Because it is stored in-memory, there is no need for aggregates or table indexes. If you're interested in the details, here's a great link:
http://www12.sap.com/platform/pdf/In-Memory%20Data%20Management.pdf
mike hill 07 Feb 2012
I heard that Hana does not use indexes? Is this true? I thought that in-memory systems would use the new T-Tree index.
Is HANA 1.5 available for General release ? 06 Feb 2012
Wanted to know if HANA 1.5 is available for general release. As per discussions at the Demo booths at SAP Teched 2011, I understand that Data modeling in HANA using ABAP is available only from HANA 1.5 onwards.
Hence, wanted to know, if HANA 1.5 is released
Vyankatesh Datar 31 Jan 2012
Dear John Appleby,
Truelly nice briefing about HANA. I would appreciate if you add some value about difference between Modeling in BW7 and BW 7.3.
Rama Shankar - Atlanta, GA 15 Dec 2011
John:
Great job on the updated HANA FAQ article.
Thanks,
Rama Shankar ( SAP BI Solutions Consultant)
Vitaliy @VitalBI 09 Dec 2011
Glenn, SAP sales is always the best source of all licensing information, but if I got it right, than you need to pay extra license only when using new Planning Kit and only when using it eith BPC for NetWeaver. -Vitaliy
Glenn Cheung 09 Dec 2011
@john: good stuff!
Heard at Teched that in-memory IP-planning functions require additional licensing... :-(
Do you know if RDSes like COPA accelerator come at a cost or can be used/modified for free?
Cheers,
Glenn
John Appleby 26 Nov 2011
Hiya,
As Vitaliy says, you can easily upgrade from HANA SP02 to SP03, it is just a newer version of the DB appliance software.
And from there you could easily install a central instance of SAP BW, using the existing HANA database and a new schema: HANA DB supports multiple schemas.
There is the sizing issue to consider, as Vitaliy comments. There is also a support issue to consider, as SAP do not yet support multiple schemas with BW. I am sure they will in future.
Regards,
John
Vitaliy @VitalBI 26 Nov 2011
Yenanda, did you mean upgrading the hardware or upgrading the software? There are couple of answers:
1. First thing if you want to use "BW powered by HANA" is either to become current Ramp-up customer, or wait until it is in General Availability
2. Yes, you can upgrade HANA 1.0 SPS2 to SPS3 running on exactly the same box.
3. You need to upgrade "the box", i.e. the hardware only if your memory requirements are going above currently sized. E.g. if your SPS2 is using box with 1TB RAM, but use case for SPS3 requires the sizing above that - you will need to pgrade the hardware.
-Vitaliy
Yenanda 26 Nov 2011
Hello John Appleby,
Thanks for a very good article. One more FAQ that is being asked is if have SAP HANA appliance (HANA SP2), can I upgrade same box to SP3 and ultimately use it for "SAP NW 7.3 Powered by HANA"?
Mike Bestvina @techdisruptive 24 Oct 2011
@John - some update on this too. I just read that HANA as a DB for BW will basically speed up everything so this is another selling point as ETL will be much quicker. I forget the term but you will also be able to "contract" InfoCubes so the star schema is less expanded. Also DSO activation can be sped up tremendously.
PSReddy 24 Oct 2011
Good coverage. How HANA will differentiate with Exalogic (of Oracle)?
Jayanta 24 Oct 2011
SAP Installations(esp SMB) typically have 30-40% capacity peak.
Why not use the 70%-60% idle time to build caches in database or in filesystems.
Then we may get sizzling MIS & Portals in R3!
Without any investment except for effort to
design and build caches and consume them
even in peak time.
No HANA, no EP, no BW - only R3.
Jayanta of Kolkata
Baris 04 Aug 2011
Why do you think that HANA is not a datawarehouse?
Ayoub 23 Jun 2011
Thanks for this great Article.
I am excited about the new SAP technology and hope it will spread all the world "in real time" :)
Bala Prabahar 23 Jun 2011
Hi John,
Thanks for your quick response. Yes, I saw 3.1; however 3.1 points to licensing issue whereas SAP note appears(my interpretation) to indicate a technical issue.
Now I'm clear. If it is a licensing issue, not a big deal; it can (if SAP/Oracle wants to) hopefully be taken care of.
Thanks again,
Bala
John Appleby 23 Jun 2011
Hi Bala, I cover that in point 3.1 - perhaps not clearly enough. The problem with SRS & Oracle is a license issue. Business Suite customers who buy their Oracle license through SAP are generally prohibited from extracting data out of Oracle by their license terms.
I heard that SAP were working on this with Oracle and Microsoft and an announcement is expected to be made. Let's keep our fingers crossed!
Bala Prabahar 23 Jun 2011
John,
Good efforts. Question on Oracle:
Note 1513496 states:
"Sybase Replication Server based replication of data from Oracle DBs into SAP Hana 1.0 is not allowed".
Does this mean Oracle is not supported by HANA 1.0? In simple terms, does this mean HANA 1.0 is not useful to SAP customers who use Oracle db?
Thanks,
Bala
Vitaliy @Sygyzmundovych 22 Jun 2011
John, I think the proper question instead of "Why doesn't HANA run on blades?" would be "Why HANA is not offered on blades?" because I believe it is really a matter of products offer and then the question why. As I look for "why" - I think SAP started with the premise that 90% of datasets for HANA use cases will fit into 1TB RAM. Therefore "distribution" (multi-node processing) functionality of SAP HANA database has been originally planned for what was known as "HANA 1.5" to support BW-on-HANA. For single node systems rack servers are just cheaper comparing to single blade with all needed supporting components.
Vitaliy @Sygyzmundovych 22 Jun 2011
Danny: for the moment we just know that "data aging" functionality is in plans for SAP HANA database (I stopped using IMDB, as it seems SAP Marketing is drifting from this name to "SAP HANA database" - probably to once again justify their existence). Accordingly to plans this data aging should allow you to define not only what tables to store permanently in RAM, and which not, but even to slice data within one table and to store let's say only 2 recent years of data in RAM permanently, while rest is loaded from drives on need basis.
And btw, there are different h/w configurations offered by vendors. There are some indeed with SSDs only, but most have both SSDs for log and HDDs for the rest.
John Appleby 22 Jun 2011
@Danny
Sure, SSD, but it's the same thing really. You could use regular disks if you had enough of them, SSDs just make it cheaper.
Data ageing is expected for HANA but I'm not aware whether it will hit in the 1.0 SP03 timeline. In the meantime, you will need a shedload of HANA if you have a big DW. There aren't that many BW implementations bigger than 5TB anyhow, so most should fit on a single box.
@mike
Agreed, will update with some info on BWA. I don't believe that BWA 7.2 supports planning accelerations though.
Danny Rohde 22 Jun 2011
That's a good start, definitely more than SAP delivers righ now ;)
Please note that HANA will not use spinning drives, but only SSD, this is necessary to maintain half decent performance for DB logs as well as in the case of disaster recovery.
What is your opinion regarding HANA under BW? I would expect that it needs to be a mix of in memory and disk based. Otherwise these large DWH will not fit onto HANA or you may end up with two DWH, one fast and one for historic data.
Mike Bestvina @techdisruptive 22 Jun 2011
Good article as always John. Just wanted to highlight something often overlooked for deciding between BW 7.3 and HANA.
"HANA 1.0 SP03 specifically also accelerates BW calculations and planning, which means you get even more performance gains."
Pushing calculations (and other runtimes traditionally unavailable in BWA, such as F4 member help) will be available with BW 7.3 and BWA. So if customers have BWA and are looking to improve OLAP performance, the cost-benefit ratio of going to BW 7.3 might outweigh going directly to HANA.