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April 21, 2016 Sab125
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.