Take-Aways from SAP HANA Update and Overview of SAP HANA SPS 08 presentation

[Former Member]

These are my take-aways from a July 2014 presentation by Mike Eacrett VP of Product Management for SAP HANA and EPM

SAP HANA Update and Overview of SAP HANA SPS 08

http://www.saphana.com/community/implement/hana-solutions

http://www.saphana.com/docs/DOC-4691

See Legal Disclaimer

HANA SP7 shipped November 2013 and has Rev #70-74

HANA SP8 shipped May 2014. On Rev #80

HANA SP9 planned for 4^th quarter

You will see maintenance Revs i.e. 74.1, 74.2 these are bug fixes.  Arne Arnold’s blog on maintenance Revs. http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2014/04/02/when-to-upgrade-your-sap-hana-system

Summary slide is a good overview of the data management technology:

• Real Time Data Platform is now SAP Data Management.
• SAP Replication servers: Sybase replication server is logged based vs ABAP based SAP LT replication server which is trigger based.
• SQL Anywhere look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Anywhere.  Used by Internet of Things, in your cars, in vending machines, etc.  Tens of millions deployments.   Was also used in the development of some of the features of SAP IQ.

HANA SP8 enhancements can be broken down by

1. Cloud Enablement
2. Apps & Industry Platform (i.e. Healthcare)
3. Big data and IoT
4. Openness

Apps:

• SAP co-innovations with ESRI for Geo Spatial included open/industry standards.  ESRI owns the very widely adopted spatial development tools and has a vibrant developer community
• New App Function Library AFL and predictive algorithms, SAS is coming in Q3
• Suite on HANA hierarchy traversal e.g. hierarchies of product groups, employee hierarchies and RH_STRUC_GET; RH_PM_GET_STRUCTURE
• BWonHANA dynamic range partitioning to allow for more flexibility in modeling / defining ranges. Also you would not have to reorg with data changes and it helps with parallel processing
• SAP HANA Interactive Education enhancements to share content e.g. code snippets, models.  Provides guided learning and search help.  HANA Academy moving to be based on SHINE.

Free online training - HANA Academy http://www.saphana.com/community/hana-academy/

http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2014/03/10/shine--sap-hana-interactive-education

Cloud Enablement:

• Ivy Bridge Server certifications – look  for large memory e.g. suite scale up server certifications and Redhat appliance certifications
• Multiple VM support – scale up only, not scale out yet
• New DR  transactional replication mode  “Synchronous with Full Sync”.  Third synchronous option.  e.g. for mission critical APO/ECC scenarios with RPO = 0 needs
• Can HANA run on mainframe? – No still requires Intel chip sets.  Co-innovation with IBM for HANA to run on Power Chip set is pending – “HoP”.  No plans for mainframe.
• Developer enhancements
  • Web IDE enhancements but Web IDE does not replace SAP HANA Studio
  • SAP River data preview now called “application explorer”

BIG Data and IoT

• New Smart data access adapters for IBM DB2 and Netezza
• Apache Spark announcement – direct connectivity  Spark, SQL in to Hadoop distribution.
  • Can consume Spark, opens HANA to Spark developers and Spark to SAP HANA developers
  • Big Data Hadoop world.  DataBricks. Shark SQL, Hive on Spark  http://databricks.com/spark

Applications and Industry Platforms

• SAP HANA studio supports Apple OSX with revision 81.  Available at App Store
• SAP HANA Answers – self help sourcing info from SAP Help, SCN, HANA Academy..

Openness

• Data center admin
  • Single production VM is GA and Multi-VM is in pilot (announced at Sapphire)
  • OS options, SLES Linux or new RHEL Redhat configurations (also announced at Sapphire)
• ADO.Net client GA – ActiveX Data Objects

• HANA on AWS - full HANA systems Amazon Web Service
• HANA Cloud platform – same as on AWS but has JAVA
• HANA on Premise

My job for the past 15 years has been implementing/deploying/maintaining EDW solutions using SAP BI to meet a multitude of business requirements.  In order to stay as up to date as possible on SAP BI, I benchmark with other companies and also attend numerous webinars and conferences.  For the conferences I look for certain presenters.  Mike Eacrett is one of these presenters.  For the latest and the official roadmaps on BWonHANA I look to Mike and his team.  And he is a wealth of knowledge on all things HANA.  I highly recommend if you are interested in BWonHANA to attend one of Mike’s presentations and search him out on SCN and http://www.saphana.com/community/about-hana