What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA an in-memory platform that runs analytic applications smarter, business processes faster, and data infrastructures simpler. It is more that just a database which  provides a unique combination of hardware and software innovations which have huge potential to optimize business applications.

•  Hardware: Memory is not a bit and limited resources now. Modern Server can now have up to 2 TB of main memory which can even hold complete database on RAM, which shifts the bottleneck from I/O to CPU Cache and main memory.

• Row and Column Search: As we knew old database have row based search only. HANA can store the table and data in Column based store. Previously column search was used data warehousing type of work where combined functions play huge role.

HANA enables to specify whether table to be stored columnar or row wise. With column-based storage, data is only partially blocked. Therefore, individual columns can be processed at the same time by different cores. Apart from performance reasons, column store offers much more potential leverage such as data compression concepts. For example, SAP HANA works with bit encoded values and compresses repeated values, which results in much less memory requirements than for a classical row store table. The fact that SAP HANA comes with different engines to process calculation logic and execute programming code is a great opportunity to push data-intensive calculations from the ABAP application layer into the SAP HANA database.  This results in less data transfer between application layer and database layer and a much better usage of resources. The application layer focuses more on orchestration and triggering the processing within the database. In the end, complex logic can be processed in very little time which results in great performance improvements.