SAP HANA - An Inner Look

SAP HANA is a new product from SAP. The current use is expected in Analytic Reporting.

SAP HANA can deliver real-time Analytic Report. The average simple reaction time for an observer to form a simple response to the presence of a stimulus is 220 ms and The average recognition reaction time has been measured to be 384 ms, but this can change as per the situation. Now if you can make a report with this keeping in mind, you get a real-time Report.

This is made possible by the use high processing power and the In-Memory Processing Technology. Before moving on to what In-Memory Technique is , lets find why do we need that?

The enterprise data resides in RDBMS or Relational DBMS. This uses the concept of transaction. A transaction is a fixed sequence of actions with a well-defined beginning and a well-defined ending. But for anaytical reports, you need cross-transactional data. RDBMS is a not good choice for this and so we use OLAP.

Here came the headache, we need to transfer all the needed data from RDBMS to OLAP system. This is a time consuming process which could take hours or even days. So, if you need this transfer of data, real-time reporting is a distant dream.

See what Vishal Sikka (CTO SAP and Executive Board Member) have to say about the feasibility and ability of this technology.

The main memory means-silicon based memory(RAM and Flash Memory). If the current fails the data is lost, but all the Enterprise have a very reliable power source. So a database in RAM, with a Coloum Oriented Architecture is used. This have existed since the 1980s, but it is only recently that Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) has become inexpensive enough to make these systems a viable option for large enterprise systems. The ability of the database layer in an enterprise application to process large volumes of data quickly is fundamental to our aim of removing the need for a separate analytics systems.

On another horizon, much innovation was happening – the Microprocessor Industry. The Intel co-founder Moore predicted that the number of transistors in sigle chip doubles every 2 years.

But Industry is fast moving than Moore predicted. The highlight include

• The number of transistors in single chip in every
• 20 months on average.
• The processing speed(or clock speed) of these transistor have increased considerably.
• Now we know the single core processor is an antique thing in market.
• Another main innovation in Chip industry is the increase of efficiency in power management.
• The new innovations in VLSI(technology of making chips) lower the cost of production.

This all makes the buying and maintanence cost to the lowest. That means the cost of expenditure is reduced.

With advanced transport technologies(like NUMA) between processor and main memory real-time reports are made.

By all these facilities the STO is reduced.