Finding SAP HANA Documentation

So I was preparing my session to speak on SAP HANA at the SAP Inside Track this week when I realised that I had a real lack of slideware that I could poach and pilfer. Sorry, I mean repurpose.

With some time later spent on Twitter, I received some assistance from various sources – which I should thank right up. Actually I tried to but the list was too long, so I’ve thanked them at the bottom. Their community spirit and assistance was essential to getting this done.

Overall resource locations

First, it is worth noting that there is an area within SCN dedicated to in-memory and HANA. It links to quite a lot of resources, mostly created by the community. There is some excellent material written by Thomas Zurek about HANA and SAP BW.

There is a Docupedia section on HANA which hasn’t really been updated since March 2011. Oops. Not sure if you can access this – requires a login. If you are a SAP Partner, you can access the SAP PartnerEdge Portal for HANA. If you’re not, the main SAP.com HANA page has some content which is worth looking at.

There is also a LinkedIn Group for in-memory SAP HANA, but the content is not great.

SAP have a Wiki Page for HANA and a SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing, which are not that active – but no surprise there, since the product is new.

Roadmap resources

The latest and most up to date HANA Roadmap was written by Uddhav Gupta and Tom Kurtz – which is odd because as far as I can see, neither of them sit in the in-memory team. But the content isn’t bad… SAP HANA Overview & Roadmap. There’s an FEATURED EVENTS which is good but out of date by now.

There’s also a HANA Solution Brief which is worth reading.

HANA FAQs

There are several FAQs out there. First, there is the one on the Bluefin Solutions website that I wrote: The SAP HANA FAQ – answering key SAP in-memory questions.

There is also a SAP HANA FAQ for Partners – probably only accessible if you are a partner.

HANA blogs

Again I may as well plug my own website – we have a SAP HANA category, which has some 11 blogs so far.

In addition, SCN has a blog area for in-memory Business Data Management, and SAP.com have a HANA blog area. The quality of the SAP.com blogs is very variable and some are pretty marketing-focussed. On this, Harald Reiter said “fun reading but no real value for me”, which is a fair analysis.

Installation Documentation

The installation documentation is well worth a read, although you need to be a customer to get access to this. There is the SAP HANA Master Guide and other things that may be available to you if you go to https://service.sap.com/instguides and then click on SAP in-memory Computing –> SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA).

Also there’s a bunch of documentation around releases, installation and configuration at http://help.sap.com/hana/

Training

There’s just one SAP HANA training course right now. http://www.sap.com/index.epx#/training-and-education/index.epx and then search for TZHANA.

Conclusions & Thanks

My main conclusion is that SAP needs to still try harder to align SAP HANA resources. There really isn’t enough out there and it is disjointed and hard to find. It’s early days for SAP HANA so there’s time to fix this.

We need clear roadmap PDFs and the resources need pulling into one place – be it the SCN area or otherwise, so people can find what they need, quickly.

Massive thanks to all the people who assisted me with my research. Usual suspects Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, Vijay Vijaysankar, Vitaliy Sygyzmundovych, James Governor and Harald Reiter. Community helpers and Mentors Karin Tillotson, Tammy Powlas, Marilyn Pratt, Mike Bestvina, Jamie Oswald, Chris Kernaghan, Simon Turnbull and Kartik Lyengar. And SAP employees Kurt Bilafer, Mike Prosceno, Chip Rodgers, Kim Kane and Jeff Word. Damn that’s a lot of people. Thank you all for your help.