Big-Data Decision-Making made better with Business Rules in SAP HANA

Big data is the market reality these days. It has significant impact on companies competitiveness and their ability to avert risk. Business rules written on data of high volume and continuous change, have to therefore deal with the performance, flexibility, consistency and transparency while making decisions. These decisions are critical to the effective operations of the organization, of any size. Big data analytics and decision making tools are therefore key factors that act to the competitive advantage of any industry.

Business Rules on SAP HANA is a one such offering – where you can author your rules in the most powerful and compact structure called Decision Table, generate and execute SQL procedure which can be used by application to get significant and radical improvement in decision making time and, monitor and manage rules.  This series of blogs focusses on various aspects of Decision Table in SAP HANA – which was first introduced in version SP05. Use them as opportunity to learn, discover, build and execute rules in form of decision table.

If you are a beginner, then it is recommended that you start your journey with blog: What is Decision Table – a concept.It leads you to blogs which explains different modeling capabilities of decision table blog: Simple Decision Table, blog: Decision Table on Database Tables, blog: Decision Table on HANA Modeler Views and blog: Decision Table on Table Type etc. If you are intermediate or expert and wish to know more about the features – that are making news in HANA SP05, SP06 and SP07 then you may follow the What can you do with Decision Tables in SAP HANA SP05    Advanced Decision Table Features in SAP HANA SP06  and New Improved Decision Table in SP07 respectively. There is yet another interesting blog: Scripted calculation view based on Decision Table that greatly helps you to expand the opportunities of using decision tables. ➕ Beyond the product knowledge, if technical queries on Business Rules on HANA bothers you, then use blog Technical FAQs on Business Rules on HANA to get the answers.

The blog: Use Microsoft Excel to manage Decision Table target Business users, Business experts etc. who tend to manage the rules without using technical tools like HANA Studio etc. Intended readers may follow the blog for getting deeper insight and updates on how to manage and execute business rules.

With the use of in-memory technologies like SAP HANA, there has been a qualitative change in the business rules of an enterprise. This next generation rules management foundation has brought in radical improvement in execution time and optimization of the rules compiler. To illustrate this performance benefit, in form of numbers and charts, there is a blog: Performance studies of Decision Table in SAP HANA.

Case studies have been long used in business to explore the details of pitfall to avoid. Usecase describes how the consumer should apply the product or solution to real world situations – with accompanying data to analyze. I hereby introduce this new set of success stories – which highlights one or more important aspects of Business Rules on HANA to solve specific business needs – thereby increasing the ease to use the product, and reduce the complexities involved with the problem context. The first story in this set is – Car Dealer Discount Rules (by Vikas Rohatgi). ➕ Another addition to this set is –  Filtering Rules using SAP HANA Decision Table. Watch this space for more such stories !

➕ With SAP HANA SP07 release, Business Rules on HANA has now attained its place in SAP HANA Interactive Education – popularly known as SHINE. It offers a pedagogical approach to teach how-to use decision tables in HANA and incorporate resources, that everyone interested, can use to get a first-hand experience of the product. I would promote you to read blog: Interactive Education for Business Rules on HANA and use this smart education technique to learn more about Business Rules on HANA, together with SAP HANA overall.

All of you are invited to read and follow this blog series that helps you to understand and use this new appraoch of modeling rules in form of Decision Table – in SAP HANA. As this new approach focuses with promising performance to enterprise rules management, I would recommend you to use it to suit the need of your organization – where fast and reliable decision making on big data has to be established. Let me know, if you have any use case or application that I can support you on. Your suggestion, feedback and comments help us improve better.

To summarize, I hereby conclude, by listing all the blogs of this series for beginers, intermediate and expert users

• Decision Table in SAP HANA – Concept
• Getting Started – Model simple decision table,
• Decision Table on HANA Database Tables
• Decision Table on HANA Modeler Views
• Decision Table on Table Type
• What can you do with Decision Tables in SAP HANA SP05
• Advanced Decision Table Features in SAP HANA SP06
• SAP HANA SP07 brings New Improved Decision Table to Accelerate your Modeling Experience
• Scripted Calculation View based on Decision Table
• Performance Studies of Decision Table in SAP HANA
• Interactive Education for Business Rules on SAP HANA
• Use-case: Car Dealer Discount Rules with Decision Table on SAP HANA
• Filtering Rules using SAP HANA Decision Table
• Technical FAQs on Business Rules on HANA