SAP TechEd Lecture of the Week – SAP HANA Vora: Overview, Architecture, Use Cases, and Road Map

The SAP Vora Overview session at SAP TechEd 2016 was one of the most well attended lectures and also among the top 10 most-viewed recordings. This shows how important this topic is to SAP customers.

SAP Vora is just the beginning of a strategic direction SAP is taking to bring sophisticated data processing and data management solutions to the Big Data space, with a strong focus on Hadoop and NoSQL-based data repositories.

Vora provides in-memory computing, OLAP modeling capabilities and advanced data processing to customers that are struggling managing Big Data landscape with a variety of Hadoop and NoSQL tools. One of the major benefits of Vora is that it combines processing capabilities in one single solution that typically need to be covered by various Hadoop and NoSQL based tools. Graph and time series processing in addition to a JSON-based document store are just a few features Vora provides. Since Vora is directly installed on the Hadoop cluster and plugs into the Apache Spark execution framework (no pre-existing SAP foot-print required) it can process Hadoop data very efficiently directly where it resides.

The intuitive and interactive Vora modeling UI provides access to Big Data to a much broader audience than most other Big Data solutions. Business analysts, information modelers and data engineers can directly access existing Vora models or create their own with a graphical modeling tool without having to write a single line of code!

For customers with an existing SAP footprint Vora provides seamless integration to SAP HANA. Existing HANA models can be browsed in the Vora modeler and easily integrated with data coming from Hadoop or other raw data stores like S3. Those combined data models are fully federated and don’t require any data replication from HANA to Vora or vice versa. This is of huge value for customers trying to combine their corporate data coming from mission critical transactional systems, real-time data marts or data warehouses with big data or digital data coming from Hadoop systems.

With Altiscale now being part of the SAP family (renamed to SAP HANA Cloud Platform Big Data Services) we can provide a fully managed cloud-based Hadoop/Spark environment. With Vora being certified on top of Altiscale very soon SAP can provide an end-to-end Big Data environment in the cloud in addition to our already certified Hadoop distributions on-premises.

If you haven’t watched the session yet I invite you to check it out via the embedded video below. It will give you a great overview of what Vora is and how it can provide value to your Big Data landscape.