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April 21, 2016 Sab125

Build a Quick Overview of SAP HANA

Architecture
SAP HANA Architecture: The two main parts of the SAP HANA server system are the
hardware and the software. On the client side, SAP provides the SAP HANA Studio
which allows application modeling.

For data reporting on a SAP HANA system, SAPs BusinessObjects software can
connect natively to SAP HANA, and reporting can be done in any other program that
can create and consume MDX queries (such as Microsoft Excel pivot tables), which
SAP HANA supports natively.

Contents [show]

SAP HANA Architecture

The following diagram is an overview (provided by SAP) of the SAP HANA system
architecture, showing clearly the different components and integration between
them:
SAP HANA Architecture: The hardware
The SAP HANA box itself is a massively multi-core, multi-CPU server, with a great
deal of memoryup to several terabytes. For example, on May 16, 2012, IBM
announced that in collaboration with SAP, they had built a machine with 100 TB of
main memory. At the time, SAP indicated that this machine would be sufficient to
run the eight largest clients of SAP ERPall at the same time!

Check also Install SAP HANA as an Eclipse Plugin

One of the main strong points of SAP HANA is its ability to process data in parallel,
cutting the initial (large) amount of data into small chunks, and then giving each
chunk to a separate CPU to work onhence the need for the large number of CPU
cores.

One other aspect of the system is that wherever possible, data is kept in memory, in
order to speed up access time. Where a traditional database system might set aside
a gigabyte or two of memory as a cache, SAP HANA takes this to the next level,
using nearly all the servers memory for the data, making access times nearly
instantaneous.

SAP HANA Architecture: The software

The database software powering SAP HANA is whats known as a column-based
RDBMS, and is a logical evolution of the following three existing technologies that
were already in use at SAP:

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SAP HANA TREX:

SAPs search engine, a component of SAP NetWeaver since 2000. TREX already
included in-memory and columnar store attributes, which were designed to improve
performance by searching data already in main memory, and already in highly
optimized data structures.

SAP HANA MaxDB:

SAPs own RDBMS technology. MaxDB is a very capable, relatively simple (when
compared to some other big players such as Oracle) RDBMS system. It is capable of
running the SAP ERP or SAP BW, despite having very low system requirements and a
fairly shallow learning curve. MaxDB brought in the persistence (that is, what
happens when the power goes offa crucial question for an in-memory system) and
backup layers to SAP HANA.

SAP HANA P*Time:

A lightweight, OLTP in-memory RDBMS system, acquired by SAP in 2005 when they
bought Transact in Memory. P*Time provided the in-memory backbone to the SAP
HANA software. It is worth noting that P*Time is a traditional row-based, not
column-based, data store.

Check also Core Data Services (CDS) on SAP HANA - Overview

By combining these three proven technologies, SAP has managed to produce a

coherent, persistent in memory database system, known internally
as NewDB (which says a lot about how the technology is viewed from inside SAP).