SAP HANA : Points to ponder

[Former Member]

HANA is in-memory technology with the provision of moving business logic to database level instead of doing computation at application server (tradition method) level. This got me to ponder over following points:

a) In traditional approach business logic computation was done at 'in-memory'; so how is it different when it comes to HANA.

b) As we combining data fetch and processing at single place; will it result in clutter/confusion of development?

c) Row store to column store shift - How will it be with transaction data?

d) In-memory technology usage for transaction systems - Paradigm shift in the way hardware was looked at

e) How HANA can be of help in this highly competitive and fast-moving world to ensure or gain leadership position in the market by being at the edge and sensing the market, customer, and competitors

f) HANA – How it is major shift from traditional approach in terms of overall processing of user requests

g) Big data on HANA (in-memory) is fine as huge amount of data has to be analyzed and processed. But why SAP is/has coming up with ECC on HANA, CRM on HANA, etc…

h) How and what will be the change in ABAP coding with ECC on HANA

i) With calculations moving to HANA; what will be the role of ABAP programmer in performance optimization of the application

I did attend session in my organization on HANA overview and ABAP on HANA. This helped to understand how will HANA be pervasive in near future (in organizations having SAP business software as their business management tool) as it comes with number of features.

• With the options of HANA as secondary database in initial stages of adoption gives IT department of organizations to try out HANA solution without the concern of business activity impact. 
• In-memory technology helps to improve application performance by major scale
• Moving the calculation part to in-memory technology with readily available data will be reducing the complexity of the coding from ABAP side
• Extended application services of HANA(full featured application server, web server, and development environment within the SAP HANA appliance) is major shift as full-fledged applications can be realized on HANA with browser as client(please note no intermediaries  from plain application perspective)

With number of performance optimizations options in ABAP with ABAP on HANA scenario; it will be paradigm shift in the development is looked at or carried out.

  I was involved in POC in which tried to compare the performance of SAPUI5 report (0.2 million sales cycle records- I know it is insignificant when it comes to capabilities of HANA) with traditional ABAP Vs. HANA as backend. In case of ABAP as backend, we used ODATA compliant gateway service for supplying data to SAPUI5. In case of HANA, we used XSJS service as data provider to SAPUI5. We saw major performance improvement of HANA based application over normal application.