The SAP HANA database is capable of much more than simply storing, serving, and delivering a single source of truth. The following are the top ten advantages of SAP HANA (both on premises and with SAP HANA Cloud).
1. Comprehensive: Database services, complex analytical processing, application development, and data integration are all included in one package.
2. Quick: In big production applications, it responds to queries in less than a second.
3. Versatile: Supports a variety of data types and mixed transactional and analytical processing.
4. Efficient: Reduces data silos and provides a lower data footprint with no data duplication and superior compression.
5. Powerful: Uses a massively parallel processing (MPP) database to quickly query enormous datasets.
6. Scalable: In a distributed context, it easily scales for data volume and concurrent users.
7. Versatile: Can be deployed in a public or private cloud, numerous clouds, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.
8. Convenient: Provides a single point of access to all of your data with advanced data virtualization.
9. Intelligent: Includes built-in machine learning that enhances applications and analytics (ML)
Secure: Provides extensive data and application security, as well as secure setup.
SAP HANA Architecture
Design of the database
SAP HANA is an in-memory, columnar, massively parallel processing database that can handle both transactional and analytical workloads on a single platform. It organises data in columns, stores it in high-speed memory, and splits and distributes it over several servers. This provides faster queries than aggregate data and avoids expensive full-table scans.
ACID conformity: Assists in meeting all requirements for the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) standards.
Multi-tenancy: Allows numerous tenant databases to share memory and processors in a single system. For optimal security and control, each tenant database has its own database users, catalogue, repository, data files, and log files.
Multi-tier storage and persistent memory support: To optimise performance and storage costs, various software solutions manage multi-temperature data (hot, warm, and cold). The SAP HANA Cloud Data Lake’s native storage extension is a built-in feature for effectively managing data between memory and persistent storage. More information on SAP HANA permanent memory can be found here.
Scalability: Supports terabytes of data on a single server and scales even farther over numerous servers in a cluster by implementing a shared-nothing architecture. Large tables are automatically distributed over various servers based on rules.
The History of SAP HANA
SAP HANA was announced in 2010, and a pre-release version was shipped to select customers in November of that year. The first official version, SAP HANA 1.0, attained the first ten go-live customers.
By 2012, SAP started announcing products for cloud computing with the SAP HANA Cloud PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). SAP HANA becomes the fastest growing product in SAP history with 345 customers.