SAP HANA Features – 7 Unique Reasons to Learn SAP HANA

This tutorial is specially designed to know why SAP HANA is popular and gives as 7 unique reasons to learn SAP HANA. Here, we will discuss the SAP HANA features in detail. As SAP HANA is one of the most popular technologies that exist. Let us start learning without any ado.

SAP HANA Features

It is known for its breakthrough in-memory concept that it works on. Along with it, there are many other unique benefits of SAP HANA given below.

• Database Services
• Analytics and Data Processing
• Application Development and Deployment
• Data Access, Integration and Quality
• Administration and IT Operations
• Security
• Multi-Engines

Let’s explore every SAP HANA features, one by one:

i. Database Services

• An in-memory database which provides real-time transactional as well as analytical processing in high-speed i.e. both OLTP and OLAP.
• SAP HANA is fully ACID compliant. This means that the in-memory database of SAP HANA has guaranteed, secure and reliable database transactions. ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.
• Columns and partitions organise for the data stores in-memory. Data parallelly process from the memory and distributed to different servers quickly.
• Multitenancy of databases is available that is, you can use more than one tenant database together as a single database and manage them individually as well.
• Multi-tier storage in the database allows the user to store data both in in-memory storage or in a disk (in columnar format).

ii. Analytics and Data Processing

• Predictive analysis and machine learning have been made available in SAP HANA. You can carry out high-performance and advanced predictive analysis of transactional data in real-time. Machine learning applications can be developed because SAP HANA supports R and TensorFlow.
• With the help of advanced data streaming engines, we can do streams analysis in real-time on the event streams.  Data from the event stream process and analyse. SAP HANA has a SQL-like language which uses as specially for processing data from streams.
• The data from the internet of things and sensors is also processed and analysed in SAP HANA. This call as analysing series data because such data fetch in a time series format. Thus, this lets the software analyse data over time like device’s energy consumption etc.
• We can do text analysis with the help of advances text algorithms used for text-mining. In SAP HANA, advanced level text analysis is done by recognizing natural-languages, subject, object, verb and doing sentiment analysis through analyzing text.

iii. Application Development and Deployment

• In SAP HANA, applications easily developed using different tools and deployed either on-premise or on a cloud.
• SAP HANA has an extended application development service which is a built-in web server using which you can create apps to analyse large amounts of data online. For developing such applications, you can use development tools like Apache Maven, GitHub, Git etc. SAP HANA supports programming languages used in app development such as JavaScript, Python, JSON, OData, Java, Node.JS, Go language etc.
• You can also develop responsive web applications. This SAP HANA feature based on the HTML5 and JavaScript framework like SAP Fiori.
• Web-based application development tools are used like the SAP Web IDE, SAP HANA Studio, SAP PowerDesigner, SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer etc for data managing, data modeling, administering the database and developing applications.
• Integrated application lifecycle management, one of SAP HANA features which manage the applications in building and packaging them so as for development, testing, production, deployment and upgrading. Thus, completing a lifecycle of the application.

iv. Data Access, Integration and Quality

• Data from various sources access from or integrate into SAP HANA for analysis. The data can access and integrate either as real-time data duplication into SAP HANA or processing pre-load bulk data loads. Data adapters are applications which facilitate data integration. The adapter load data from different databases, cloud storages, Apache Hadoop.
• The data quality improves by the data cleansing. For instance, cleansing a sample of geospatial data includes removing unnecessary information from the data like names, phone numbers, street name, address, e-mail etc. Data cleansing enriches the data by improving its quality.
• The Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark integration are done by the virtue of applications like SAP Vora engine, SAP cloud platform, a big data engine, Apache Hive, Big data services, and Apache Spark adapters.

v. Administration and IT Operations

All the operations and functionalities of SAP HANA can administer by using different administration tools. One popularly known administration tool is SAP HANA Cockpit where you can analyse SQL execution plans, CPU functioning, memory utilization, backing-up, recovery, process execution etc.

vi. Security

• Security of the data in SAP HANA ensures by security approaches like single sign-on and authorization. Kerberos protocol and security assertion mark-up language (SAML) use to achieve this. All the important security aspects manage in the security section of the DBA Cockpit. Security of the data ensures by providing complete data encryption, data auditing, securing application services, data storage and communications.
• Disaster recovery will ensure in SAP HANA by native as well as third party tools. Processes used to backing-up and recovery of data if lost are mirroring, storage, backup, synchronous and asynchronous data replication etc. Using the recovery features in SAP HANA, you can keep your system at standby in various area ranges like a local campus, a city or a remote location.

vii. Multi-Engines

SAP HANA provides a multi-engine query processing environment where different queries like textual queries, SQL queries for relational data, graph queries etc.

So, this was all about SAP HANA Features & benefits. Hope you liked our explanation.

Conclusion

Thus, from this tutorial, we can say that SAP HANA is a very powerful technology with these numerous unique features. Each feature adds effectively to the other features and makes SAP HANA a complete and advanced data analysis and management tool.

We hope that this information on SAP HANA features will help you gain a better understanding of the technology. See you in the next lesson!

Till, if you have any doubt/query, feel free to share with us!

Related Topic- SAP HANA Use Cases (Industry-Based)