SAP HANA ADMINISTRATION INTRODUCTION

SAP Hana Administration is the synthesis of three separate products

It began in 1996 as a student project at SAP in collaboration with DFKI. TREX became a standard component in SAP NetWeaverin 2000. In-memory attributes were added in 2002 and columnar data store was added in 2003, both as ways to enhance performance.

2. In 2005 SAP acquired Menlo Park based Transact in Memory, Inc. With the acquisition came P*Time, an in-memory light-weight online transaction processing (OLTP) RDBMS technology with a row-based data store.

3. MaxDB (formerly SAP DB), a relational database coming from Nixdorf via Software AG (Adabas D) to SAP, was added to TREX and P*Time to provide persistence and more traditional database features like backup.

In 2008, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka wrote about Hana Administration Administration “…teams working together with the Hasso Plattner Institute and Stanford University demonstrated how a new application architecture is possible, one that enables real-time complex analytics and aggregation, up to date with every transaction, in a way never thought possible in financial applications”. In 2009 a development initiative was launched at SAP to integrate the three technologies above to provide a more comprehensive feature set. The resulting product was named internally and externally as NewDB until the change to Hana Administration Administration DB was finalized in 2011.

SAP Hana Administration Administration is not SAP’s first in-memory product. Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA, formerly termed BIA) was designed to accelerate queries by storing BW infocubes in memory. This was followed in 2009 by Explorer Accelerated where SAP combined the Explorer BI tool with BWA as a tool for performing ad-hoc analyses. Other SAP products using in-memory technology were CRM Segmentation, By Design (for analytics) and Enterprise Search (for role based search on structured and unstructured data). All of these were based on the TREX engine.

Taking a different approach Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) used LiveCache for its analytics.

Versions, service packs

SAP co-founder (and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board as of 2012) Hasso Plattner advocated a “versionless” system for releases. The support packages to date have been:

SP0 – released 20 November 2010; Hana Administration Administration first public release

SP1 – released 20 June 2011; Hana Administration Administration general availability (GA); focus is as an operation data mart

SP2 – released 27 June 2011; more data mart functions

SP3 a.k.a Hana Administration Administration 1.5 – released 7 November 2011); focus is on Hana

Administration as the underlying database under Business Warehouse (BW); also named Project Orange

SP4 – projected Q2, 2012; will resolve a variety of stability issues and add new features for BW

SAP Hana Administration Architecture overview:

The architecture overview of the In-Memory Computing Engine of SAP Hana Administration. The SAP Hana Administration database is developed in C++ and runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. SAP Hana Administration database consists of multiple servers and the most important component is the Index Server. SAP Hana Administration database consists of Index Server, Name Server, Statistics Server, Preprocessor Server and XS Engine.

1. Index Server contains the actual data and the engines for processing the data. It also coordinates and uses all the other servers.

2. Name Server holds information about the SAP Hana Administration database topology. This is used in a distributed system with instances of Hana Administration database on different hosts. The name server knows where the components are running and which data is located on which server.

3. Statistics Server collects information about Status, Performance and Resource Consumption from all the other server components. From the SAP Hana Administration Studio we can access the Statistics Server to get status of various alert monitors.

4. Preprocessor Server is used for Analyzing Text Data and extracting the information on which the text search capabilities are based .

5. XS Engine is an optional component. Using XS Engine clients can connect to SAP Hana Administration database to fetch data via HTTP.

Other databases marketed by SAP

SAP still offers other database products:.

MaxDB

Sybase IQ

Sybase ASE

SQL Anywhere

As a database agnostic company, SAP also resells databases from vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft to sit under their ERP Business Suite.

Competition Offering its own database solution to support its Business Suite ERP puts SAP in direct competition with some of its largest partners IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Among the more prominent competing products are: