SAP HANA

SAPHANA is an in-memory database from SAP AG in Walldorf, Germany, and is suitable for online transaction processing( OLTP), data warehousing, and real-time analysis of large data sets. SAP HANA was first introduced in 2010 as a "High Performance Analytic Appliance." The core applications of "SAP Business Suite on HANA" have been available since January 2013.

A HANA system consists of an index server, statistics server and name server, as well as a preprocessor server and the XS Engine. The entire system can be administered using SAP HANA Studio and its SQL accesses. By executing the logic in RAM, SAP HANA works significantly faster than conventional databases.

Since SAP HANA's in-memory computing( IMC) processes several terabytes of data in main memory, the longer access times of conventional mass storage are eliminated. Compared to hard disk systems, the slowest component in the operation of a database, OLTP databases can be evaluated several 1,000 times faster with SAP HANA.

HANA works simultaneously with the column orientation common in in-memory databases and the row orientation common in relational databases. Column-oriented storage eliminates the need for indexing and enables higher aggregation of data as well as high compression, which makes databases significantly smaller.

SAP HANA regularly writes modified data and logs asynchronously from memory to persistent storage, whose data volumes can be located in the file system or configured as RAW devices. The data area is kept entirely in memory and contains SQL data and undo log information as well as information about the data models.

The log area is replicated to persistent storage, where information about data changes resides, which can be backed up synchronously after a transaction and overwritten only after a backup. SAP HANA can be scaled across multiple systems, with a high number of processors and cores speeding up processing. If multi- node systems with blade servers are used, they concentrate a high number of central processing units( CPU) in a small space, but this requires parallelization in software programming.

SAP HANA is only offered as a dedicated complete solution consisting of software( operating system, file system, tools) and hardware from manufacturers such as IBM and HP, Dell, Hitachi, Cisco, or Huawei.