Overview of SAP HANA

The purpose of this Article is to give an overview of SAP HANA in order to understand the key ideas and concepts behind SAP Simple Finance. We will start with the master plan of SAP HANA. We then investigate some fundamental concepts of SAP HANA, incorporating its in-memory data storage dictionary encoding and data compression, parallel execution capabilities, and the concept of using the delta store to optimize write operations. We will summarize the overall vision of SAP HANA as the single unified platform for mixed enterprise workloads to be specific, value-based and analytical data processing. At the core of SAP HANA is a massive parallel database management system (DBMS) that runs completely in main memory.

As opposed to traditional DBMSs, which are designed for optimizing performance on hardware with constrained main memory, the  SAP HANA database is designed starting from the earliest stage around the possibility that memory is accessible in abundance to keep all business data and that input/ output (I/O) access to the hard disk is not a constraint. While traditional data- base systems put the most effort into enhancing hard disk I/O, SAP HANA concentrates on improving memory access between the CPU cache and the main memory. Figure 2.1 illustrates a conceptual overview of SAP HANA, which first and foremost incorporates a full DBMS into a standard SQL interface, transactional isolation and recovery, and high availability.

Read More: In-Memory Technology and SAP HANA