Fernando Ros, HANA Distinguished Engineer and Brazilian

SAP TechEd/d-code is just around the corner now, so here is the second of our HDEs of the TechEd/d-code season! Fernando Da Ros is an independent consultant working via SAP in Brazil, and our first HDE from Latin America and one of the earliest HANA practitioners. He’s extremely passionate about helping people on the forums, especially in the Portuguese forums, which is very cool. So please give a warm welcome to Fernando!

Tell us a little around your background in the industry

Began on development of systems in 85 programing micro computers covering industries of food, retail, drugstore, clothing, advocacy among others at this time languages was mainly Basic, Clipper, Pascal and C/Assembly for short things. Later around 98 I met Delphi and relational databases and started to support big companies. On 2006 I moved to Rio and engaged IBM and was my first task with exclusive role as developer/problem solving, two years later I joined SAP, as a contractor with an specific role to be the support/ brigdge of SAP NFE (Nota Fiscal Eletronica) product which was new here on Brazil and specially new for developers based on Germany. Currently my role at SAP is Development Architect for new products HANA based.

How did you get into the SAP HANA space?

2011 I started to hear news about it through the grapevine and became very interested, I take the chance within an innovation project at Petrobras to build a product to report a fiscal report.

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

I’m used to go through openSAP.com which you can learn and practice for free with cloud environment.

Be part of community and look blogs, wikis and threads here on SCN http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory

Read old questions, make your own.

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

Currently I’m working ad Development Architect on an SAP product name SAP ECF that will cover a fiscal report that Brazilian companies will be obligated next year. This product works over SAP TDF repository, something like a VDM for tax reporting and auditing.

Tell us about one of your HANA war wounds!

The mentioned fiscal report on first versions of HANA was an excellent opportunity to become expert on HANA as at that stage HANA Development was focusing on OLAP and all recommendations make us fail. After rebuild sometimes we reached the final code mixing all artifacts Analytic, Attribute and CE/SQL.The only one that, at that time, bring no value was calculation view.

As all timeline was 3 months to deliver we couldn’t even wait for OSS be analysed, so it was a serious of try, error, do differently.

It was necessary to create “trace/debug” artifacts to understand what is going on inside the execution, and…. This also changes the execution so it was a flying blind.

What do you see in the future of HANA?

Well in my perception we will not talk more about HANA in future as it will be omnipresent in some SAP product.What he brings unlocked many possibilities that wasn’t possible before, cases like bring powerful information for mobiles and enable smart apps for executives that don’t need.

BTW: It was possible before but not so easy and integrated as today.

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

Reuse of pre-executed views is a most for me. Example with 3 views:

   CA_LEVEL1

     CA_LEVEL2 ⇓ this call CA_LEVEL1

        CA_LEVEL3 ⇓ this call CA_LEVEL2 which call CA_LEVEL1 also

Currently in HANA such design lead over execution of already executed views. In this simple example CA_LEVEL1 3 times and CA_LEVEL2 2 times which is a shoot in the feet.

Tell us a bit about yourself outside of HANA and work

Good question, I have done in recent years is basically working. I have 3 kids and a lovely wife. Gradually I am recovering from surgery on my leg and resuming a healthier life.