What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA cloud is a well-known in-memory database technology that encompasses various components which makes it an ideal suite for a business application development and a centralized ERP system. This comprises data modeling tools, HANA database, HANA administration and data provisioning, which makes it a complete package.

The SAP HANA uses real-time data processing to fetch data directly from the main memory to speed up the data recovery operations. The deployment of this platform both on-cloud or even on-premise aids real-time analytics.

Factors of SAP HANA

Few factors that make SAP HANA cloud such a strong player in the race is it’s RAM, and multi-core processors. This enables a smooth experience while dealing with an enormous amount of data. The multi-core processing engines run data parallelly within different columns of the same database and then returns data to the clients in no time.

As it is a column-oriented database management system helps in database optimization of data structure and also eases out, storing large data only by compressing it. SAP HANA uses both OLTP and OLAP application processing which means that one can use it both for transactional and analytical purposes. One can achieve this aspect by extracting data from the transactional systems to transform the data.

It also offers a query processing environment for both structured and unstructured data such as a relational database and less structured, respectively. So, one can use SAP HANA in many different ways like in accelerators, Business Warehouse, and native applications.

What are SAP HANA Features?

Here are the capabilities and features of SAP HANA:

• Comprehensive administration tools.
• Parallel database processing.
• Multi-Tier storage system available 
• Data modeling tools and application development tools
• Robust security and disaster recovery
• Graphs and spatial processing
• Responsive web applications
• Remote data synchronization
• Application lifecycle management

What are the different SAP HANA Components?

SAP HANA is a collection of different technologies and tools that work in tandem to bring it into existence. Now, let’s look at the four technological components that are SAP HANA.

• DB: SAP HANA DB is known as the core in-memory database, which plays a central role in the functioning of SAP HANA.
• Application Cloud: The SAP HANA Cloud is another cloud-based infrastructure that ensures the proper functioning of appliances.
• Studio: SAP HANA Studio also has many modeling tools for data handling and management.
• Appliance: SAP HANA software can be installed in any appliance, as it is vendor hardware.

What’s the Significance of SAP HANA?

With the advent of technology, any form of innovations to make the data storage and retrieval process super fast was made possible with SAP HANA. Earlier, data was stored in various external storage disks (hard disks) and CPU fetched it. It is a super slow process involving various intermediate components like a cache.

It is at the time of the introduction of an in-memory database. In the case of SAP HANA, data is stored in the RAM and then fetched by the processing units directly from there. This process makes the data retrieval process super fast that the traditional databases.

SAP HANA, since its launch way back in 2011, made a significant breakthrough in database management technology due to the in-memory database. SAP HANA is a world-class technology that can support both analytical (OLAP) and transactional (OLTP) data applications.

SAP HANA is nothing sort of a new age technology that supports real-time data processing and analysis that is not only cost-effective but super fast too.

What are the different SAP HANA Applications?

SAP HANA has a significant customer base that provides a wide range of applications. Let’s take a look at those:

• Core process accelerators
• Planning, Optimization applications
• SAP HANA also works as a digital core for an IoT.
• It efficiently processes high volumes of transactional and analytical data to support both OLTP and OLAP applications.
• It works as a digital core for big data, devices, people, business networks, and many social networks.

Advantages of SAP HANA

Here’s a list of benefits of using the new age technology, SAP HANA:

• SAP HANA offers decision-making capability and real-time analysis, which enables the processing of massive amounts of data to run the business. 
• SAP HANA has an in-memory database that makes data processing and transactions super fast. 
• SAP HANA also allows data to be stored and processed in columns and rows, which will help the operation to run parallel, which eventually increases the speed of operation by manifold.
• In the case of SAP HANA’s in-memory database, one has access to databases both for analytical (OLAP) and transactional (OLTP) queries all at once.
• The source-agnostic capabilities of SAP HANA help to gather more data to enable easy data integration.

Disadvantages of SAP HANA

• SAP HANA Cloud is only compatible with and can run only on SUSE Linux or SAP-certified hardware. 
• For a lot of people, limited hardware compatibility makes SAP HANA a costly investment
• SAP HANA is not meant to support all ERP products as they have a different kind of business architecture. It requires ERP users to change the architecture so as to make HANA compatible.
• SPS releases and updates are more frequent in the SAP HANA versions, which makes it difficult to purchase every single time an update is released. Plus, the updates are time-consuming as well. 
• During heavy data processing and calculation load, the SAP HANA servers shut down easily.

The Scope of SAP HANA

SAP HANA is one of the promising technologies, and it will be no exaggeration if it is considered a revolution in the database management world. SAP HANA is a widely popular technology across the globe which has hit top ranks on the revenue scale within a few years of its launch.

With better updates and versions every year, this technology is here to stay and is probably the need of the hour. It will only continue to grow as per the user base and also market share in the upcoming years. Right now, a lot of the fortune 500 companies are clients of SAP for this particular technology that is SAP HANA.

Owing to its popularity and use cases, jobs are also going to keep increasing in the future and bright professional life to all those who aspire to master this technology.