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This article is for SAP HANA beginners, who don’t really understand what it is about and are lost in all the
marketing and technical jargon.
What is in-memory?
In-memory means all the data is stored in the memory (RAM). This is no time wasted in loading the data
from hard-disk to RAM or while processing keeping some data in RAM and temporary some data on disk.
Everything is in-memory all the time, which gives the CPUs quick access to data for processing.
Can I just increase the memory of my traditional Oracle database to 2TB and get similar
performance?
Well, NO. You might have performance gains due to more memory available for your current
Oracle/Microsoft/Teradata database but HANA is not just a database with bigger RAM. It is a combination
of a lot of hardware and software technologies. The way data is stored and processed by the In-Memory
Computing Engine (IMCE) is the true differentiator. Having that data available in RAM is just the icing on
the cake.
Example of dictionary algorithm: You have a Country column in your Customer table in your
database. Let’s say you have 10 million customers from 100 countries. In the standard row-based
storage you will need 10 million string values stored in memory. With the dictionary compression, the
100 country values will be assigned an integer based index and now you need only 10 million
integers + the 100 string values + the mapping of these values. This is a lot of compression in terms
of bytes stored in memory. There are more advanced compression algorithms (RTE etc) which
would even reduce the 10 million integer storage.
Now imagine a scenario with 100 tables and a few thousand columns. You get the picture. Less data
is exponentially proportional to fast processing. The official tests show a compression of 5-10x, that
is a table which used to take 10GB of space would now need only 1-2GB of storage space.
2. Partitioning: SAP HANA supports two types of partitioning. A single column can be partitioned to
many HANA servers and different columns of a table can be partitioned in different HANA servers.
Columnar storage easily enables this partitioning.
3. Data stripping: There are often times when querying a table, a lot of columns are not used. For
example, when you just want the revenue information from a Sales table which stores a lot of other
information as well. The columnar storage enables that the unnecessary data is not read or
processed. As the tables are stored in vertical fashion, there is no time wasted trying to read only the
relevant information from a lot of unnecessary data.
4. Parallel Processing: It is always performance critical to make full use of the resources available.
With the current boost in the number of CPUs, the more work they can do in parallel, the better the
performance. The columnar storage enables parallel processing as different CPUs can take one
column each and do the required operations (aggregations etc) in parallel. Or multiple CPUs can
take a partitioned column and work in parallel for faster output.
Multiple Engines
SAP HANA has multiple engine inside its computing engine for better performance. As SAP HANA
supports both SQL and OLAP reporting tools, there are separate SQL and OLAP engines to perform
operations respectively. There is a separate calculation engine to do the calculations. There is a planning
used for financial and sales reporting.Above all sits something like a controller which breaks the incoming
request into multiple pieces and sends sub queries to these engines which are best at what they do.
There are separate row and column engines to process the operations between tables stored in rows and
tables stored in column format.
Caution: Currently, you can't perform a join between a table stored in row format and a table stored in
column format. Also, the query/reporting designer needs to be careful about which engines are being
used by the query. As the performance reduces if for example the SQL engine has to do the job of the
calculation engine because the controller was not able to optimize the query perfectly.
I hope the above information is useful to get a better understanding of SAP HANA.Please let me know
your comments/suggestions.
1: The picture is obviously a much simplified version of the engine and there is much more to it than
represented in the picture.
Disclaimer: I am an SAP employee and a certified HANA consultant. All the opinions expressed here are
completely my own and have no influence of my employer.
Reactions:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2012
As of Feb 2012, SAP has made available only one Associate Consultant certification with
code:C_HANAIMP_10. (there are two certifications available now: C_HANAIMP_1 for
application consultants and C_HANATEC_1 for technical
consultants). C_HANAIMP_1 certification tests knowledge on all aspects of SAP HANA 1.0 for the
profile of a SAP HANA Associate Consultant.
The topics in the exam include: Business use cases for HANA platform, loading data into HANA
database, modeling and creating views on basic tables to make meaning of the data, creating reports
using various tools such as SAP BusinessObjects tools on these created views, optimizing the
performance for these reports, user management, security and data access privileges.
Below I have gathered all the information available to the best of my knowledge related to the certification
exam:
Q: If a question has 3 correct answers, and I answer 2 correct answers, will I get partial marks?
A: No. You MUST answer all the correct answers to get marks. The scoring is binary - either you answer
a question right or you answer it wrong. Nothing in between. On this note, make sure to pay attention on
the indicated number of correct answers to make sure that you have chosen correct number of answers.
Choosing less or more answers than indicated will directly get you 0 points irrespective of the correctess
of your choices.
Resources:
1. Go to https://www.experiencesaphana.com/ and play around. Go to the “Try” section and spend
some time playing with all the “test drives” available. Might not help for the exam but definitely gives
an idea of how stuff works.
2.Some really useful videos: Hana Modeler (29 mins, gives very good overview of
data modeling in HANA), Demo of Business Objects 4.0 tools consuming data from HANA (13
mins, if you are not used to Information Design Tool (IDT), its a good watch).
3. Training:All HANA related trainings are listed here with sign-up links.
4. If you have access to an HANA system and some extra time, a lot of guides
especially for reporting tools are available
here: http://help.sap.com/hana_appliance . The best guide to get started on that
page is the Modeling Guide, using which you can try out work flows for all aspects
of Data Modeling. (Don’t be disappointed with the locked files available only to
Partners and Employees; there are many open-to-all guides as well).
5. SAP employees and partners can access the OHA10 course by going
to:http://service.sap.com/okp
If the left hand menu doesn't open automatically, go to: SAP Consultant Education -
> Early Product Training -> SAP Online Knowledge Products and search for HANA
6. You can also request access to an HANA system from SAP. All FAQs related to
this access are here.
Extra resources (not directly useful for exam, but useful in the long term)
1. Documents: The business case for Hana and a good overview of SAP HANA Architecture.
2. Some very informative documents are available on https://www.experiencesaphana.com/ Go to
Browse -> Content -> Documents. Note: the filtering doesn’t work properly, spend some time to find
relevant documents.
Please let me know if I have missed something or if you like/dislike the information above in comments.
Also, the notes are from February 2012 and the course/exam contents may or may not have changed
since then.
Please note that as an SAP employee I cannot share any documents and all the exam participants have
to sign an NDA promising not to share any exam contents.
Disclaimer: I am an SAP employee and a certified HANA consultant. I have just gathered all the
information available freely on the internet. All the opinions expressed here are completly my own and
have nothing to do with my employer.
Posted by Raja Agrawal 39 comments: