HANA VORA: SAPs OLAP Tool for

Big Data
BY
V. KRISHNA CHAITANYA
Evolution of Big Data Platform
1. Interest and excitement around Big data has always been on the rise over the past few years with
full blown implementations.

2. Mining petabytes of data for value is essential for businesses today which calls for a scalable storage
and distributed approach.

3. Most of the big data systems (e.g. Hadoop) available today have batch oriented nature for querying
data, which is time consuming which Hadoop vendors find it challenging in analyzing the data.

4. Also, a significantly different skill-set (scala, R, python etc..) is required in consuming this kind of
data.
Questions that are in the minds of customers
Can I use my SQL developers to work on Hadoop data?
Can my data scientists access Hadoop data without needing to worry about data
integration issues?
Can I run queries on Hadoop data without waiting hours for the result?

So clearly there is a need for a platform that can remove data latency and quickly analyze data in a single,

user friendly environment by providing a unifying layer to work with big data.

This will enable users to seamlessly integrate different temperatures of data and give all business personas

access to big data without requiring a significant skill-set upgrade.

SAP HANA Vora an Agile Platform for Big
Data Analytics
1. HANA Vora is an in-memory query engine which leverages an extended Spark execution framework
by providing OLAP capabilities on top of Hadoop data.

2. In simpler terms Vora is technically a plug-in for Apache Spark that produces accelerated results by
processing Hadoop data in memory.

3. Vora uses SPARK SQL library and HANA computing engine to provide interactive analysis for the end
users.

4. VORA handles OLAP analysis & hierarchical queries very well as it does layers in few
enhancements to Spark SQL.
1. SAP HANA Vora provides a distributed computing framework at enterprise scale to be able to
accelerate, innovate, and simplify your data.
2. Being able to bring these two together, Vora provides that layer on top of Hadoop.
 HANA VORA Engine Architecture
1. HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) is the
core of Hadoop and storage part that can store
huge volumes of data i.e. Terabytes &
Petabytes whether it is structured or
unstructured.

2. Sine, the HDFS is deployed on a commodity

hardware (normal hardware). We can scale the
cluster by adding more nodes.

3. HDFS is very reliable and fault tolerant as it

divides the given data into data blocks, then
replicates it and stores it in a distributed fashion
across the Hadoop cluster.
Why VORA ?
1. Customers are looking forward in leveraging their business coherency across
enterprise and big data, especially when trying to build these mash-ups by
combining enterprise data and the data present in Hadoop landscape.
2. This is where VORA comes into picture by providing some of its vibrant solutions:
An open development interface with accelerated In-memory, distributed computing engines.
Compiled queries.
Support for Scala, Python and JAVA and also for major Hadoop distributions.
Enhanced mash up application programming interface for easier access to enterprise application
data.
Supports Hierarchies by enabling drilldowns on Hadoop data.
Provides bidirectional connectivity between HANA and Hadoop.
 Customer Benefits of VORA
1. In the recent trends most business are
moving towards a tired data architecture (Hot
+ Cold).

2. Hot data is stored in in-memory databases

such as HANA, while cold data is stored on
Hadoop (Apache Hadoop etc.).

3. VORA addresses the critical issue of the

bidirectional combination of hot and cold data
in a meaningful, coherent way without a
significant investment from a monetary, time
and infrastructure standpoint.
Use Cases
Use Case 1: Hadoop for social media and email for fraud detection Using Vora, financial institutions can build fraud detection
models to integrate social media data and email data stored in Hadoop with transaction data stored in SAP ERP systems. Traditionally
this type of integration takes months to complete with significant costs, but with Vora, the integration is quick and seamless; data
scientists can directly build off the models built on Vora.

Use Case 2: Predictive maintenance for automobiles using sensor data in Hadoop Companies can track automotive
performance though the continuous monitoring of sensor data. With Vora, companies can integrate real-time streaming data from
devices with customer master and transaction data stored in HANA/ERP to help improve vehicular safety. The ability to infuse enterprise
data with up-to-the-moment data from external sensors allows business to make contextually savvy decisions and improve processes.

Use Case 3: Track lost airline baggage using RFID With RFID tracking enabled for all airline baggage, the data stored in Hadoop
can be queried within minutes using Voras boosted SQL performance. This helps airlines improve the lost baggage metric and reduce
costs. Vora developers can quickly build queries on Hadoop tables, which enables businesses to keep pace with up-to-date operational
scenarios.
 VORA Modeler
1. VORA modeler consists of three main components:
Data browser
SQL editor
Modeler
Data Browser
The data browser allows you to quickly display the relations such as tables, views, and cubes in
SAP HANA Vora without having to write a query.
SQL Editor
In the SQL editor, you can execute SQL only by typing in the SQL queries and execute those queries by
clicking the execute button after selecting the respective query.
Modeler
Data modeling refers to an activity of refining or dividing data in database tables by creating views that
portrays a business scenario.
THANK YOU