Technique/SAP HANA2012. 5. 11. 15:38




INTRODUCTION

 

Ever since SAP-HANA was announced couple of years back, I've been following the discussions/developments around In-Memory Database space. In Oct 2011, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison introduced Oracle Exalytics to compete with SAP-HANA. After reading white papers on both SAP-HANA and Oracle Exalytics, it was obvious they were different. The comparison of SAP-HANA and Oracle Exalytics is like comparing apples to oranges.

 

On May 8, 2012 I tweeted:

 

SAP Mentor David Hull responded:

 

I was a bit surprised to know that most don't have a clue as to the difference between Exalytics and SAP-HANA. The difference looked obvious to me. I realized either I was missing something or they were. So I decided to write this blog. And since this blog compares SAP products with Oracle products, I've decided to use Oracle DB instead of generic term RDBMS.

 

First I'll discuss the similarity between SAP-BW, Oracle-Exalytics and SAP-HANA. At a very high level, they look similar as shown in the picture below:

Similarity.png

 

As shown, BW application sits on top of a database, Oracle or SAP-HANA. And the application helps the user find right data. The similarity ends there.

 

Let us now review how Oracle-Exalytics compares with SAP-BW with Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA): As you can see below, there appears to be one-to-one match between the components of SAP-BW and Exalytics.

 

 

New_BWA_EXA.png

Steps
SAP-BWExalyticsComments
1 and 1a

Data found in BWA;

and returned to the user

Data found in

Adaptive Data Mart & returned to the user


2 & 2a

Data found in OLAP

Cache and returned to the user

Data found in Intelligent cache and returned to the user

This means data was not found in BWA

or Adaptive Data Mart

3 & 3a

Data found in

Aggregates and returned to the user

Data found in Essbase Cubes and returned to the user

This means data was not found in

1) Adaptive Data Mart or BWA and

2) OLAP Cache or Intelligent Cache

4 & 4a

Data found in Cubes

and returned to the user


Not sure if Essbase supports aggregates;

However Oracle supports materialized

views;I assume this is similar to SAP-BW's aggregates.

 

 

 

The diagram below shows why Exalytics Vs SAP-HANA comparison is like apple to orange comparison. In Exalytics, the information users need gets pre-created at a certain level/granularity. One of the best practices in BW/DW world is to create the aggregates upfront to get acceptable response times.

 

In SAP-HANA, however, aggregates are created on the fly; data in SAP-HANA resides in raw form, and depending on what users need, the application performs the aggregation at runtime and displays the information on the user's screen. This helps the users perform analysis near real-time and more quickly.

 

 

New_EXA_HANA.png

Based on the diagrams shown above, Exalytics it seems is comparable to SAP's six year old BWA technology.

 

SUMMARY

 

Based on discussions above, the diagram below compares all three products SAP-BW with BWA, Exalytics and SAP-HANA.

 

New_BWA_EXA_HANA.png

 

                                           Note: I didn't connect Disk to HANA DB because it is primarily used for persistence.

 

I wanted to keep this blog simple so didn't include a lot of details. Depending on your questions/thoughts, I'm planning to either update this blog or write new blog.







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Posted by AgnesKim
Technique/SAP HANA2011. 11. 29. 13:33

HANA optimized planning with BW-IP
Uwe Fischer SAP Employee 
Business Card
Company: SAP AG
Posted on Nov. 28, 2011 03:34 AM in Enterprise Data Warehousing/Business Warehouse, In-Memory Business Data Management

URL: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/ip

 
 

In-memory technology is a success story within SAP NetWeaver BW for many years. The introduction of SAP NetWeaver BW accelerator provided a new level of reporting performance and became role model for others. Since then there was a strong desire to significantly accelerate planning use-cases with this technology, too. The value proposition can be summarized to:

  • Improved plan quality (allow more simulations cycles)
  • Improved user experience (provide better response time)
  • Improved plan accuracy (process higher data volume) 

In general it is the mass data operations that benefit the most from in-memory technology: in reporting it naturally is the aggregation, in planning the disaggregation. But within planning there are much more mass data operations and every planning function is a candidate.

However for a significant performance benefit, mass data operations need to stay within the data layer completely, including data read, calculations and write-back.  BWA did not provide the durability of an acid-compliant database and as such was a secondary store which could not manage written-back data. With SAP HANA the same technology becomes available now with full acid-compliance.

To understand what it means to have the complete operations in HANA, let us look at the processing on a classical database (the width of the arrows describe the volume of data transferred):

First the data is read into a local cache in the application tier. There it is exposed into the plan session which is used to feed both, the BEx query for the end-user and the calculations in planning functions or disaggregation in the query. The calculations are tightly bound to different other components: the metadata of the plan application, constraints like characteristic combinations that the calculations must not violate and the delta buffer that contains the pending changes. These buffered deltas together with the locally cached data feed again the plan session. Finally the deltas in the buffer are written back to the database upon a save-command. All this is handled in the application tier for classical databases.

With HANA optimized planning all steps, data read, calculations and write-back, are done in HANA completely. The components remain the same: 

The plan session orchestrates the data flow between the physical data indexes and the consuming BEX query, the calculations in planning functions or disaggregation in the query. The data is read via projections into the level of aggregation demanded. The calculations are applied and the result written back into a delta buffer within HANA which is subject of further data requests. With this all mass data operations remain within HANA and only query relevant data and meta-data is exchanged between the application tier and HANA leading to significant reduction of IO-costs. In addition the columnar storage and parallel processing provide superior performance.

As a great benefit of this design the complete user experience remains untouched. This is true for the end-user clients (e.g. BEx suite, Advanced analysis for office) as well as for the modeling UI (ABAP planning modeler) and all existing BW-IP models. I.e. there is no need to migrate BW-IP scenarios to run on HANA. Adjustments might be considered though to optimize the HANA usage since not the complete BW-IP feature set can be executed in HANA today (see note 1637199). The other way around, all capabilities offered in HANA are available in the ABAP runtime as well. This allows to toggle between two operation modes of BW integrated planning on HANA:

 Coming from an existing BW 7.x installation (A), the upgrade comprises a simple upgrade to BW 7.30 SP5 on the existing database and a subsequent database migration to HANA. Here BW-IP leverages the SQL-interface of HANA leading to superior read performance. Plan calculations are executed in ABAP (B), still. Their execution in HANA can be enabled by activation of the planning applications kit, activated by flipping a switch (see note 1637199) (C). The planning applications kit leverages the calculation and planning engines build into HANA to process the plan calculations in the best possible performance.  This way the planning applications kit combines the feature-rich capabilities of BW-IP with the superior performance of SAP HANA.

Finally let me summarize the relation between BW-IP and the planning applications kit (PAK).

 

BW-IP

Planning applications kit (PAK)

End user UI

identical

Modeling tools

identical

Feature set

identical

Full HANA optimized

no

partially 1)

Further investment

no

Yes

License

no

yes 2)

 

1) SAP Netweaver BW 7.30 SP5
2) License required for SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, Version for SAP NetWeaver'

 

 

Uwe Fischer   is development manager in the SAP BW analytic server.


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  • License
    2011-11-28 10:15:34 Ethan JEWETT Business Card [Reply]

    This blog was really clear and helpful, but it ends with a bombshell. Am I reading this right? If you want to use the "in-memory" planning engine for BW IP you need to purchase a license for BPC version for Netweaver?
    • License
      2011-11-28 11:59:38 Henrique Pinto SAP Employee Business Card [Reply]

      Yeah, the text is ambiguous. "License for BPC" can be interpreted as:


      1) you need to license BPC in order to use PAK;


      2) you need to license BPC if PAK is going to be used for BPC frontend.


      2) is highly unlikely, though, since BPC frontend is not mentioned anywhere in the blog, and the existing communication talk about BPC over HANA only on early 2013.


      Additionally, if you read the aforementioned note (https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1637199), it states:


      "Use of the ABAP Planning Applications Kit requires a license for the following SAP functionality: 'SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver'."


      which could also be interpreted either as 1) or 2) above.


      As mentioned, I personally interpreted it as 1).


      BR,
      Henrique.


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Posted by AgnesKim
Technique/SAP HANA2011. 11. 29. 13:30

Dealing with R and HANA
Alvaro Tejada Galindo Active Contributor Silver: 500-1,499 points
Business Card
Company: SAP Labs
Posted on Nov. 28, 2011 05:03 PM in Analytics, Beyond SAP, In-Memory Business Data Management, Open Source

 
 

First things first...what's "R"? Simply put...is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. More infomation can be found here R on Wikipedia

 

I have code in many programming languages, some of them very commercial, and some of them little known, but I got say, that from all, "R" is one of the most weird and awesome languages I have ever played with...and it has an amazing repository of custom add-ons.

 

If you have read the HANA Pocketbook you will realize that there's a reference to "R" in the page 59. Now, that kind of integration between "R" and HANA haven't been developed yet, but it doesn't mean we can get our hands dirty doing some research and development.

 

What I did for this example was to simply show the information of my Analytic View on HANA and exported as an CSV file. From there, it's easy to import it into "R" and start doing some nice things. (The idea is that we should be able to code "R" straight in the HANA environment...or at least that's how I think it's going to be...)

 

image

 

image

 

image

 

The first example that we're going to build on "R" is a simple Pie graphic, using the information from the FORCURAM and CARRNAME fileds.

 

image

 

In this example, we're basically reading the CSV file, including the header. And doing an aggregation of the two fields we want to interact with. After that, it's just a matter of pass the values, the names and call the pie.

 

image

 

Next example is a little bit more complex...and uses a custom package call Word Clouds

 

image

 

Here, we have to load the required libraries, read the CSV file, do the aggregation, create a matrix with the aggregation values, sort the matrix, create a new vector, get it's length, create an array containing the names and finally assign the values and call the wordcloud graphic method...

 

image

 

Hope you like it...and stay tuned for more "R"...

 

Alvaro Tejada Galindo  Active Contributor Silver: 500-1,499 points is a Development Expert, Scripting Languages Geek, Programming books author, Geek Comics author and SAP Mentor Alumni.



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Posted by AgnesKim
Technique/SAP HANA2011. 11. 29. 13:28

How to Best Leverage SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 on SAP HANA 1.0 - Webinar Presentation

     Patrice Le Bihan    Presentation     (PDF 2 MB)     19 October 2011
  •  Overview

In this session you will learn how to best integrate SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 with SAP HANA 1.0. We will cover the capabilities and implementation options for not only reporting but also data modeling, security and other deployment considerations.

Posted by AgnesKim