Features and Benefits of SAP HANA

Database Features of SAP HANA that contribute to making it unique in the industry

In-Memory, Columnar,  Massively parallel Database Processing

The SAP HANA platform permits online transaction processing and online analytical processing workloads using a single data copy on a single platform. It stores data in high-speed memory, organizes it in columns, and partitions and distributes it among multiple servers. This delivers faster queries that aggregate data more efficiently while avoiding costly full-table scans, materialized views, and analytic indexes.

Full ACID compliance

SAP HANA helps ensure compliance with all requirements for the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) standards. A two-phase commit protocol protects atomicity, while multiversion concurrency control and distributed transactions help guarantee consistency. A built-in transaction manager safeguards isolation, and the logger provides durability by writing commit-log entries to disk.

Multitenancy

SAP HANA allows multiple tenant databases to run in one system, sharing the same memory and processors. Each tenant database is fully isolated, with its own database users, catalog, repository, data files, and log files for maximum security and control. You can move or copy tenants to other systems. Your high-availability and disaster-recovery settings apply for all tenants. Backup and recovery is supported at the tenant level or the system level.

Multitier Storage

With the dynamic-tiering feature, you can keep data either in-memory or on the disk in columnar format. No data is duplicated. This feature allows you to process large data volumes at the right price and performance levels. The amount of data you can process in SAP HANA is not limited by the size of the memory in the system. Since disk tables are
native to SAP HANA, management, backup, and recovery functions are the same as with in-memory tables. In-memory and disk tables can be joined while accessing data, and in-memory tables can be converted to disk tables (or vice versa) at any time. SAP HANA includes a data lifecycle management tool for moving data between memory tables
and disk based on specified rules and policies.

Data modeling and stored procedures

SAP HANA offers a native language called SQLScript that lets you build stored procedures and use advanced capabilities to build complex logic that runs inside the database. It includes a business function library with built-in parameter-driven financial functions. In addition, it includes a framework that lets you build custom algorithms and run them  securely inside the database. Core data services, graphical calculation views, and decision tables further simplify and accelerate the creation of database logic.

Administration

SAP HANA provides comprehensive administration tools to support various levels of administrative capabilities from any device and location. You can use these administration tools to start, stop, restart, backup, and recover and to perform offline diagnostics. The SAP DB Control Center systems console is a modern, user-friendly Web administration tool based on the SAP Fiori user experience that supports multiple databases in your landscape. SAP HANA includes tools to analyze Structured Query Language (SQL) execution plans and CPU and memory utilization over time to pinpoint problems. For applications based on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, SAP HANA can be managed from the DBA cockpit and SAP Solution Manager.

Security

SAP HANA safeguards your information through such strategies as authorization and single sign-on using the Kerberos protocol from MIT and the security assertion markup language (SAML). SAP HANA keeps communications, data storage, and application services secure and uses the latest encryption and auditing techniques. A cockpit includes a security dashboard to monitor all key performance indicators related to security.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

SAP HANA supports high availability and disaster recovery to meet a broad range of service levels through an array of techniques such as backup, storage mirroring, synchronous and asynchronous system replication, hot standby, auto restart, and auto failover. It supports
standbys at campus, metropolitan, and remote locations for maximum availability. Several third-party backup and recovery tools are certified to work with SAP HANA as well, so you have your choice of approaches.

Scaling Up and Out

Scale Up refers to adding more components or upgrading components of a single server such as Processors, Memory etc. Scale out refers to adding additional servers to serve the need.  SAP HANA supports multiple terabytes of data in a single server and scales further by implementing a shared-nothing architecture across multiple servers in a cluster. You can distribute large tables across these servers automatically, based on round-robin, hash, or range-partitioning rules.

Spatial processing

SAP HANA provides native support for spatial data and spatial functions. Spatial processing is supported by SQL through Open Geospatial Consortium standards, The use of open standards lets you exchange spatial information with third-party spatial solutions to develop enterprise-wide location intelligence. SAP HANA includes base maps with political boundaries and points of interest to accelerate development of modern location-aware business applications. Third-party spatial solutions can also use SAP HANA as a high-performance, in-memory data store for managing and processing spatial data.

Graph

SAP HANA lets you store and process highly connected data using a dynamic data model called a property graph. Storing and querying graph data is supported through SQL. A graph provides full transactiona consistency and guaranteed ACID compliance without replicating live transaction data. Native graph algorithms are provided to uncover relationships in your data in real time. You can also combine graph data processing with additional advanced data processing functionality in SAP HANA, such as text analytics, predictive, and spatial.

Predictive Analysis and R integration

predictive algorithms for both expert and automated modes. Additionally, you can run open-source R scripts on SAP HANA through integration with R Server. Some of the predictive algorithms run on streaming, spatial, and series data and are self-improving. The ability to perform predictive analytics on an entire body of transactional data lets you develop modern applications that forecast outcomes and help your business adapt processes in real time.

Search

predictive algorithms for both expert and automated modes. Additionally, you can run open-source R scripts on SAP HANA through integration with R Server. Some of the predictive algorithms run on streaming, spatial, and series data and are self-improving. The ability to perform predictive analytics on an entire body of transactional data lets you develop modern applications that forecast outcomes and help your business adapt processes in real time.

Text Analytics

Text analytics in SAP HANA include advanced natural-language processing and entity extraction capabilities, such as segmentation, stemming, tagging, and sentiment analysis. SAP HANA also extracts so- called triples – sequences of subject, verb, and object. These functionalities help extract meaning from unstructured data and transform it into structured data for analysis. SAP HANA also supports text-mining algorithms to mine relevant keywords in a body of documents.

Streaming Analytics

You can capture and process streams of events from many sources in real time using the highly scalable smart data streaming engine inside SAP HANA. SAP HANA supports an SQL-like processing language to combine streams with contextual data and analyze the result on the fly. To improve scalability, SAP HANA comes with a streaming-light component you can deploy on the streaming data source to analyze and filter streams before they reach SAP HANA.

Series Data

Internet-of-Things data and data from sensors arrive in a time-series format. SAP HANA processes time-series data and other kinds of series data efficiently to discover trends over a period. Whether you are monitoring price fluctuations, seasonal shifts, machine efficiency, energy consumption, or network flow, monitoring data over time helps you discover patterns you can exploit to your competitive advantage.

Extended Application Services (XS)

The XS application server is a built-in Web server that helps you set up Web-based applications to process large amounts of data efficiently. The XS engine is independently scalable from the database server to meet requirements for Internet applications. It supports multiple  programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Node.JS, JSON, Open Data Protocol (OData), and C++ runtime, making it ideal for building applications based on a microservices architecture. With SAP HANA, you can choose among various open-source development tools, such as Git, GitHub, and Apache Maven.

Responsive Web

SAP HANA includes an HTML5 and JavaScript framework based on SAP Fiori that lets you develop responsive Web applications. These applications run on any device and adapt to screen size automatically, delivering a consistent look and feel across all touch points.

Application Life Cycle Management

Integrated application lifecycle management helps you build and package applications, transport them from development to test to production, and deploy and upgrade them.

Application Development Tools

To develop applications with SAP HANA, you can use the SAP HANA studio or lightweight Web-based development tools. The SAP HANA studio is an Eclipse-based environment for data modeling, application development, database administration, and security management. SAP  Web IDE is a browser-based development environment for building applications and managing application lifecycles. And, if you prefer the ABAP programming language, the development environment in ABAP now includes optimized features that help you build SAP application extensions on SAP HANA with a minimal learning curve. You can also use SAP PowerDesigner® software with SAP HANA to model data for building enterprise architecture.

Data Virtualization and Federation

Data federation using smart data access lets you access information transparently from many remote data sources and from Apache Hadoop without moving data from remote sources to SAP HANA. SAP HANA provides built-in adapters to help you access data from
a wide array of sources.

Data Integration, Replication and Quality

SAP HANA supports comprehensive features to handle all data-integration scenarios. These include real-time data replication as well as bulk-load processing, data transformation, cleansing services, and data enrichment services. Adapters are available for loading data from several databases, cloud sources, and Apache Hadoop, along with a customsoftware development kit for building your own adapters. SAP HANA  includes functionality to enrich geospatial data and algorithms to cleanse personal names, titles, phone numbers, firm names, and e-mail and street address information.

Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark integration

SAP HANA provides multiple options to analyze Apache Hadoop data, including the SAP HANA Vora™ engine, an Apache Spark adapter, and Apache Hive. You can access data in the Hadoop distributed file system and access MapReduce functions as data sources in SQL using user-defined virtual functions.

Remote Data Sync

With remote data synchronization, you can bidirectionally synchronize data between SAP HANA and databases in the SAP SQL Anywhere suite that are embedded in devices or located at the edge of your network. Now you can make enterprise data available to remote workplaces or locations beyond the reach of high-bandwidth connections. In addition,
your enterprise can collect and analyze remote data to monitor devices at distant locations – empowering your stakeholders to be more responsive across the entire extended enterprise.