Introduction of HANA into SAP BW

The extensive capabilities of SAP HANA and its ability to perform with drastic power helped it to make its way into many SAP ERP modules. But, SAP HANA in itself is an excellent database, data platform and application platform. However it does not provide a number of own functions that is required in a complex Enterprise Data Warehouse. Thus, this high performance appliance is integrated with SAP BW (Business Warehouse) platform.

For those functions, SAP provides the BW EDW platform – BW takes care of SAP security and authorizations, complex hierarchies, non-cumulative data for stock and many other capabilities. In addition, the BW team has worked hard to update SAP BW 7.4 for the HANA generation, with a set of technologies it calls LSA++, which simplify and accelerate the build and operations of an EDW.

In short – if you want to build an app, data-mart, data platform or database, then use HANA on its own. If you want to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse, then use BW on HANA.

So SAP is still investing in BW?

Yes – more than ever, in my opinion, with the latest BW 7.4 version. If you’re interested in the detail, there is a good Roadmap available, but the short version is that the BW team have invested to take advantage of the HANA DB. This means faster data loading, fewer layers of information, more agility. It allows you to mash-up BW and non-BW data (if you have a mixed license that allows for this) and real-time with batch. Plus, a lot of the tooling has been reworked. The BW guys have been hard at work and BW 7.4 is a real step change.

In addition, because BW uses a very low level of HANA calculation (lower than you can model in HANA Enterprise), for complex reporting requirements and query structures, BW on HANA can be much more flexible and performing than HANA Enterprise. If you’re interested in the detail, there is a good explanation by BW lead Thomas Zurek. Yes, in some cases, BW on HANA is more capable than HANA Enterprise.

In addition, SAP changed the license late last year, and whilst you should check license detail with your sales rep, you should find that your license allows you to load data into HANA via BW, but then use all the HANA modeling tools to build data-marts, if you so wish. This is very useful for the build of custom data-marts in BW on HANA, though remember, you lose some of the BW functionality by doing this so it must be done with care.

 What about cold data. Does BW on HANA support this?

 Yes, and it supports it very well with the NLS connector for Sybase IQ. We find that for data warehouses larger than 5TB in Oracle, that a good portion of that 5TB is cold data that is rarely accessed. In this case, it doesn’t make sense to buy expensive in-memory hardware to store the cold data, and it makes sense to store it in a separate store. SAP allows this in BW via a connector for Sybase IQ for Near-Line Storage.

 So your older, non-changing data becomes stored in IQ and is visible the same way in BW and this improves the TCO equation for HANA significantly. If you have a smaller BW system then this won’t be necessary but it is a great addition for large-scale systems.