"Book reviews" sap memory computing-Hana

I have been dealing with SAP for a long time because of my work relationship. So I had some knowledge about Hana last year, but the company's current application scale is still small and there is no intention to Mount Hana for the moment, however, it is necessary to do some learning in advance. Tsinghua University Press recently published the sap memory computing-Hana, which took two weeks to read.

As an emerging technology, to have a better understanding of it, apart from official materials, the most important thing is others' success experiences. As one of the few major sap customers who first implemented Hana in China, Nongfu Spring's experience is undoubtedly very valuable. Mr. Hu Jian, one of the authors of this book, is the person in charge of the implementation team of the former Nongfu Spring Hana project. Therefore, the content of this book is the first-hand materials that have been tested by practice. Another author of this book, Mr. mongodong, is the director of SAP China's department of planning and architecture design. This book also provides an authoritative guarantee from SAP.

In fact, the biggest difficulty for Hana is how to understand what Hana is? I once thought that Hana was just a new database system developed by SAP based on Sybase and SAP's own MaxDB after the acquisition of Sybase, it took a lot of time to understand that it was not just to put the database into the memory for processing, but to create a storage and computing platform based on a new idea. The first chapter of this book provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis.

Chapter 2 to Chapter 6 will provide detailed introductions from Hana installation to implementation in various aspects. They can be used as consultants who are interested in Hana.

Chapter 7 introduces Hana practices in Nongfu Spring. I had the honor to share this part with Mr. Hu Jian at some technical meetings. It should be said that Hana is indeed of great significance to companies like Nongfu Spring.

As a few Hana books on the market, the main content of this book is relatively entry-level, relatively comprehensive, but not very in-depth. We hope that more and more in-depth books will be available in the future.

After reading this book, I also want to talk about my thoughts on Hana.

Technically speaking, Hana uses column storage and compression technology, combined with large memory hardware, to achieve full memory processing of large data volumes and truly implement "real-time" computing of services, it plays a significant role in improving enterprise decision-making efficiency.

Looking at the general process of enterprise development, the development of information systems is usually from simple financial management software development, to ERP, to data warehouse/business intelligence.

In this case, ERP is more about daily business data processing and is not suitable for further analysis and mining based on its data. The reason is that the business data changes greatly, while the amount of data processed by analysis and mining is large, running on the same hardware will affect the performance of each other due to resource restrictions, therefore, we have a separate data analysis and mining platform such as data warehouse and a presentation platform such as business intelligence.

Although the analysis on an independent platform does not affect the business flow, as the data volume increases, there will still be new problems:

First, as the amount of data increases, the analysis workload increases, and a deeper level of information needs to be mined. The hardware requirements are too high, with the so-called "Big Data" solution, data and analysis are distributed and implemented through heap hardware.

Second, as the data volume increases, more analysis methods are required for the business. In the existing hardware environment, the application runs for a long time, in addition, the independent database warehouse platform will affect the timeliness of business decision-making due to the non-real-time data extraction. Hana was born to solve this problem.

Based on the experience of Nongfu Spring, simply changing the database to Hana can improve the performance by hundreds or even thousands of times. Even if the data warehouse and analysis system are added on this basis, it may also improve the performance by 10 times. This is very helpful for the management to understand the operational status of the enterprise in a timely manner.

Of course, there are many advantages, mainly for large enterprises such as Nongfu Spring, such as small and medium-sized enterprises, when the data volume is not large, such problems should not be encountered.

In addition to Hana, enterprise computing also has some other high-performance solutions, such as Oracle's exadata all-in-one. The difference is that Oracle is based on its own hardware and operating system, and in this environment it specially optimizes an integrated solution composed of Oracle databases, with high performance, A considerable amount of hardware is based on ultra-large memory and dedicated SSD storage.

In contrast, Hana is a pure software solution that runs on SAP Hana-certified hardware and system platforms provided by other hardware vendors. It has its own advantages and disadvantages compared with exadata.

In addition, other Hana and SAP products, such as ERP, BW data warehouse, and Bo business intelligence products, should have a better degree of consistency.