Raj Kumar Salla, HANA Distinguished Engineer and traveler

Well right after I announced Krishna Tangudu, HANA Distinguished Engineer and Poet and Tamas Szirtes, HANA Distinguished Engineer and Linguist, HANA Revision 73 was announced. That’s pretty much how it works, right!

So to celebrate Revision 73, which contains a handful of minor stability and performance improvements, we’re minting Raj Kumar Salla into the HDE program. Raj is a HANA Engineer for Swedish partner Excent and has written such interesting pieces as Table Transpose in SAP HANA Modeling. Please welcome Raj into the HDE program!

Tell us a little around your background in the industry

I have 13 years of experience and worked on multiple technologies. My career started with Mainframes which has black background with green and red texts on screen and I loved to code programs on COBOL, DB2, IMS DB, CICS.

DB2 was my first database to work and gained good knowledge on SQL. Then the time came to say good bye to Mainframe and to Welcome Business Objects. First I was limited to prepare only reports and took some time to work on Universe. After working for good time I changed the gear to In-memory.

You can find some details about me on my “Blog It Forward” Blog.

How did you get into the SAP HANA space?

When exploring for knowledge on Business Objects, I regularly visited Dave Rathbun’s professional blog and in one of his blogs he mentioned about HANA which I never heard before.

After that I was hearing this word frequently from many sources and it made me to think about. Finally I made up my mind to make my career in SAP HANA and started collecting the materials, reading it multiple times and did a lots of hands-on.

This has changed my life to transform and entered the world of HANA.

What advice would you give to people looking to learn SAP HANA?

Just read and read and read…. and then try to implement what you read. Now you have excellent material from help SAP portal and amazing blogs and documents in SCN. Whenever you find good materials, never forget to make your hands dirty on it. AWS, Cloudshare and Remote desktop are the sources for these.

While learning, Lars Breddemann and John Appleby blogs were my all time favourite. Now many people were doing good job in contribution.

Can you tell us a little about the projects you are working on right now?

I am currently working in Excent, joined very recently one-and-half month back, working on proof of concept(POC) and once it is done it will be showcased as probable solution to prospective and existing customers of Nordic region for their current challenges.

Tell us about one of your HANA war wounds!

Doing the modeling which fits all your requirements with top performance is not always an easy task, keeping product limitations in mind and sometimes you will questioned for why you chosen this way. Such an incident has happened with me for doing table transpose and I enjoyed that discussion and the result was my blog on Table Transpose in SAP HANA Modeling.

What do you see in the future of HANA?

HANA is no more a hype instead it is a future. It is clearly the SAP’s top technology initiative, become the fastest growing software in the world and is the platform for every single thing the SAP will do going forward.

If there was one change you could make to HANA, what would it be?

To have wizard for complex modeling to make the modeler life easy. One example can be doing a table transpose.

To have wizard for scheduling feature in HANA studio.

To have many functions available in expression editor of Calculated columns, for example isnumeric().

Tell us a bit about Raj outside of HANA and work?

I love travelling a lot and want to cover many parts of the world. Since my daughter was born, I was not traveling much and will start again when she turn 3 years old. So I need to be patient for another year.