SAP HANA

History

During the early development of SAP HANA, a number of technologies were developed or acquired by SAP SE. These included TREX search engine (in-memory column-oriented search engine), P*TIME (in-memory OLTP Platform acquired by SAP in 2005), and MaxDB with its in-memory liveCache engine. The first major demonstration of the platform was in 2008: teams from SAP SE, the Hasso Plattner Institute and Stanford University demonstrated an application architecture for real-time analytics and aggregation. Former SAP SE executive, Vishal Sikka, mentioned this architecture as "Hasso's New Architecture". Before the name "HANA" stabilized, people referred to this product as "New Database".

The software was previously called "SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance".

The first product shipped in late November 2010. By mid-2011, the technology had attracted interest but the experienced business customers still considered it "in early days". HANA support for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse was announced in September 2011 for availability by November.c

In 2012, SAP promoted aspects of cloud computing. In October 2012, SAP announced a platform as a service offering called the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and a variant called SAP HANA One that used a smaller amount of memory.

In January 2013, SAP enterprise resource planning software from its Business Suite was announced and became available by May.

In May 2013, a managed private cloud offering called the HANA Enterprise Cloud service was announced.

Rather than versioning, the software utilizes service packs for major releases. Service packs are released every 6 months.

Overview

The index server performs session management, authorization, transaction management and command processing. The database has both a row store and a columnar store. Users can create tables using either store, but the columnar store has more capabilities and most frequently used. The index server also manages persistence between cached memory images of database objects, log files and permanent storage files. XS engine allows to build web applications.

SAP HANA Information Modeling (also known as SAP HANA Data Modeling) is a part of HANA application development. Modeling is the methodology to expose operational data to the end user. Reusable virtual objects (named calculation views) are used in the modelling process.

MVCC

HANA manages concurrency through the use of multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), which gives every transaction a snapshot of the database at a point in time. When an MVCC database needs to update an item of data, it will not overwrite the old data with new data, but will instead mark the old data as obsolete and add the newer version.

Supported platforms

Deployment

SAP HANA can be deployed on-premises as an appliance from a certified hardware vendor or on certified hardware with tailored data center integration (TDI). With tailored data center integration (TDI) approach, existing hardware components such as storage and network can be reused. Both horizontal and vertical scalability are supported. HANA is also available in the cloud as a Database as a Service on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer, Huawei FusionSphere, HP Helion, or the SAP Cloud Platform (PaaS) as well as SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (MCaaS).

Editions

SAP HANA licensing is primarily divided into two categories.

Runtime License:

Used to run SAP applications such as SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA.

Full Use License:

Used to run both SAP and non-SAP applications. This licensing can be used to create custom applications.

As part of the full use license, features are grouped as editions targeting various use cases.

In addition, capabilities such as streaming and ETL are licensed as an additional options.