From last Saturday (23rd of March) to this Wednesday (27th) Melbourne is the centre of SAP Tech Excellence, with a handful of events for the delight of SAP Geeks. Whereas I'm not attending the main event, Mastering SAP Technologies, I did attend the other two, Code Jam on Saturday and Inside Track (with Demo Jam) on Sunday. In this first part I'll talk a bit about what happened on Saturday.
craig.cmehil brought the Code Jam Down Under with all things HANA. It was the perfect opportunity to people like me, who had no previous contact with HANA, to have a taste of it. More experienced people were also welcomed as we had two experts in the room, some guys named thomas.jungand rich.heilman, if I'm not mistaken :wink:
I arrived with my friend Fendy about 20 min early for a 2pm start. The guys were finalizing the room set up so we had a good chat with Craig before the real action begun. As most people in the room didn't have an HANA instance to play with, Craig created one for us on AWS. It didn't take more than 5 minutes to do so.
Craig gave us two workbooks to choose from. I (and most ABAPers) chose alvaro.tejadagalindo3flight model because, you know, is the flight model :smile: . Things were going well until we had some infrastructure problem (i.e. internet stopped). We chatted a bit more until we had it restored, which didn't take long. I was at full speed at the flight model but when I failed to upload the data I thought was a good idea to have my own instance. I went to AWS and created my HANA instance - again, less than 5 minutes to do so. I created my tables, my vews, my attribute views, analytic views and calculation views. Some small problems here and there, but with the collaboration of the others jammers and the expert help from Craig, Tom and Rich I had my flight model finished and running, with full Excel integration. That was nice!
Talking about nice, there was obviously the break for food. And it was actually more than nice, it was great. Most people kept coding while eating and I was no different. The "penne carboHANA" I ordered was delicious, giving me that extra energy to finish my work.
Al in all it was a great event. Great tech, great people, great chat, great coding, great food. I'm the only one to blame for not taking more advantage of the experts; I should have been more prepared, ie played with HANA before, so I could have asked them better questions. But still, was totally worth and when I got home I immediately started working on jordan.cao's PSA model.
Thanks Craig, Tom and Rich for the event. And if you want to have a Code Jam in your location, it's much easier than you think, and I'm sure Craig is looking forward to make it happen.
