An in-memory database by any other name would be as fast

What’s in a name? Ever since SAP started talking about the HANA database in public, a great many people have speculated as to just what HANA might be an abbreviation of. Several possible answers made the rounds, with “Hasso’s New Architecture” and “High-Performance Analytic Appliance” being two of the most popular ones.

SAP quickly made it clear, that HANA is, in fact, not an acronym for anything, but rather a name. That didn’t quite put an end to the speculation, however, so I feel it’s necessary to reiterate that message, as clearly as I can:

HANA
Ain’t
No
Acronym

There, that should settle the matter once and for all. You’re welcome 🙂

Updated later: Well, this was written in jest, obviously 🙂 Geeks are fond of recursive acronyms. That is, acronyms that refer to themselves in a recursive manner. One of the most well-known examples is probably the GNU open-source project: GNU is an acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”. In the above example, there’s also a logical paradox of sorts thrown in, since this acronym claims to not be one. I’ll leave pondering that to you. Oh, and there’s a bit of Shakespeare in there as well, just because.