Key differentiators of SAP HANA

Wondering why SAP HANA is such ground-shaking technology? What are the key advantages of SAP HANA over disk-based database solutions? Well, there are quite a few technical differences between databases that were designed to be stored on a disk versus one that was built to be entirely resident in-memory, as per the SAP HANA Essentials e-book. Here is a brief summary of some of the key advantages of SAP HANA over its disk-based cousins. Continue reading “Key differentiators of SAP HANA”

ABAP for HANA – Strategy and Roadmap

With the rise of key technology trends like Cloud, Mobile, and In-Memory you may start to wonder how these affect the good old ABAP Application Server (AS). A recently published document describes SAP’s vision, strategy, development, and commitment to enable ABAP for SAP HANA. It addresses the following questions:

  • What ABAP support do customers and partners get with regard to the technology trends?
  • How does the AS ABAP help to leverage the benefits of the technology trends?
  • What is the impact on customer-specific developments (existing ones, new ones)?

In essence, SAP has started improving the AS ABAP in a step-by-step approach:

  •  Step1 – “ABAP can access SAP HANA”: ABAP-based applications can use the SAP HANA database as secondary persistence (side-by-side scenarios)
  • Step 2 – “ABAP runs on SAP HANA”: ABAP-based applications can use the SAP HANA database as primary persistence (analytical use-cases)
  • Step 3 – “ABAP optimized for SAP HANA”: the optimization of ABAP-based applications for the SAP HANA database is actively facilitated by the AS ABAP (transactional/hybrid use cases)

The new enhancement package to optimize ABAP for SAP HANA is planned to be available to first customers and partners by the end of 2012. Standard availability is planned for 2013. SAP intends to invest in ABAP technology beyond 2013. This means that SAP plans to continuously update the AS ABAP which might involve the deprecation of some selected functions.

– Mendel

SAP update June 2012

SAP StreamWork analyses collaborative decision-making with strong visualization and use of data held in the SAP HANA memory store, in addition to other sources. SAP Cloud Strategy will be based on its acquired SuccessFactors business, which will be built up into a new global business unit with initially 5000 staff and launch a complete range of business apps starting with a version of SAP Payroll. SAP Visual Intelligence introduces a new generation of Business Intelligence based on HANA that allows users to ask ad hoc questions across the content held in HANA with no predefined structure. SAP ERP applications will be re-engineered to run on HANA with the claim that transactional operation can be made on HANA databases and the resulting data made useable for all types of business intelligence purposes according to direction announcements at SAP SAPPHIRE event. SAP is to acquire Ariba, a long established ecommerce services provider, to add to its new ‘Cloud services’ based business unit. www.sap.com