SAP HANA: An Introduction – Book Review

Finally…after SAP TechEd Las Vegas 2012 and the upcoming TechEd decompression…I managed to finish reading the SAP HANA: An Introduction book and as promised…here comes my review…

When I heard that this book was coming out…I was thrilled to read it and expand my knowledge on SAP HANA…gladly Jon Kent from SAP Press send me a copy so I could read it in the comfort of my home…again…thanks Jon!

This book, intents to be an introduction to SAP HANA and it really play the role very well…it starts by explaining some key concepts like In-Memory Computing, Big Data and of course SAP HANA, and then it moves to a interesting chapter of SAP HANA versions…meaning…what options do we have for an SAP HANA box…in my particular case, working for SAP and doing evangelism on SAP products, I thought…”Ok, this chapter is not for me, but let’s keep reading”…amazingly…I read it from beginning to end…even when I’m not going to buy an SAP HANA box myself, I was happy to see all the options provided to customers in a well and never boring explanation.

Next…some use cases…which is for sure really important as we all need to know what can we achieve with SAP HANA.

Another important and interesting point is how to plan your business strategy around SAP HANA…again, nothing that will affect my everyday job, but really useful for customers, as they will know exactly where to look and how to start planning their next SAP HANA implementation.

The chapter on SAP HANA instalation, was really good as well…technical requirements, size of the system, hardware options and also SAP HANA for BW.

Of course, the book couldn’t left Business Intelligence alone, so a whole chapter is dedicated to this matter…and me…I’m a total BI neofit, so this chapter really helped me to understand who the BI guys work today and how they will work tomorrow when they play in their new shiny SAP HANA system.

From here…the parts that interest me the most came into play…Data Modelling with Information Composer, Data Modelling with SAP HANA Studio and Advanced Concepts in SAP HANA Studio…being a developer at heart, I really enjoyed and learned a lot reading this chapters…

Data Provisioning…everybody is concerned about Data Provisioning, and with good reason…you buy an SAP HANA box and you want to move all your data from the ERP or BW system…with all the options provided by SAP, like SLT, ETL, Sybase Replication Server and DXC…we’re all in safe hands.

Lastly, the SAP HANA Administration chapter was a nice reading as well…I learned many secrets and also confirm my thoughts that SAP relies heavily on Python…as some scripts are provided to help with the administration…something that really makes me happy as Python is a must programming language.

So…to wrap up…I totally enjoyed myself reading this book…if haven’t buy it…then go on-line and buy it…if you have buy it but not read it…then go ahead and read, you won’t regret it…have you already it? Share your thoughts…

The world is changing thanks to SAP HANA, and by reading this book, we can help to make that change faster.

Also…if haven’t done it yet…go to SAP Developer Center and request your free 30 days access to SAP HANA…or…create your own SAP HANA server on Amazon Web Services.