A month with HANA Express Edition and my NUC (part 1)

[boobboo]

Last month I was given an Intel NUC by some friends in SAP as part of the release program of HANA Express edition - the only stipulation was that I needed to find something cool for it to do and write about it.

Well I didn't just find one thing to use it for that was cool - I found lots and lots and I'll run through some of those things in this series.

Although I was given the NUC at SAP TechEd In Barcelona, I didn't get a full chance to turn it on until I got home a few days later. Which was totally worth the wait as I fell in love with this small very powerful and punchy device.

The NUC is a Core i7 with 32GB of RAM and an on-board SSD, it is blindingly fast in everything it tries. My study has never seen anything so fast unless you count the speed of the dogs behind the couch when you mention V-E-T to them.

My first use case when turning it on was to spend time getting re-acquainted with HANA and managing it. It has been over a year since I have had to administrate a HANA Instance, the tools have developed across nearly 3 service packs - moving from the HANA studio into the Fiori based dashboard and the WebIDE. So my first job was to ditch the HANA Studio and spend time using purely the WebIDE.



In my day to day job I see so many HANA admins still using the HANA studio or the command line tools to update their HANA Instance. I have to say that the Dashboard below looks pretty good, and very functional.I have used the Fiori tools at a few customers to run patch updates and to deploy new software - although I have not used it to administrate the system.



The dashboard is missing a lot of critical components that are needed to manage the HXE instance, but these are easily added using the Dashboard edit function.



You can customise the dashboard by moving tiles between groups which makes life a lot easier



I have started using the WebIDE instead of the HANA Studio - which is taking a little getting used to



My next job is going to be getting a data set loaded into HXE and running some queries on it. To do the job I have downloaded a UFO sighting data set which has some fabulous data points, including Latitude and Longitude which will enable some great visualisations.

Until next time