Using the SAP HANA Database

By using SAP HANA as the database for SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), you can benefit from simplifications in data modeling processes, a reduction in the complexity of the Data Warehouse landscape, the greater agility of the Enterprise Data Warehouse and the option of combining the strengths of an SQL-oriented approach with an integrated Enterprise Data Warehouse application.

The difference between running SAP BW on SAP HANA and running it on a different database it can be seen in the following areas:

• Simplification of infrastructure, modeling and administration

  • The SAP HANA database replaces both the previous database and SAP BW Accelerator, thus contributing to a reduction in infrastructure costs. Instead of database administration and additional SAP BW Accelerator administration, the SAP HANA database requires just one set of administration tools, for monitoring or backup and restore for example.

  • EDW data and native SAP HANA data can be flexibly combined. You can thus consume BW InfoProvider data by generating SAP HANA views from SAP HANA for example, and can integrate SAP HANA data into SAP BW via the Open ODS layer or CompositeProviders.

  • With SAP BW on SAP HANA, you can reduce the number of persistence layers.

  • Data modeling and data remodeling has been simplified by the introduction of SAP HANA-optimized objects.

• Performance

  Data-intensive functions are moved from SAP BW to the SAP HANA database, thus improving performance:

  • SAP BW on SAP HANA brings excellent performance and improved decision making: Complex analysis and planning scenarios with unpredictable query types, high data volume, high query frequency and complex calculations can be processed with a high degree of efficiency, as read accesses are in-memory optimized. With SAP HANA, the query performance on DataStore objects is as fast as on InfoCubes.

  • Thanks to its high compression rate, the column-based data store ensures that less data needs to be saved. Column-based storage is used for all InfoProviders that save data. The SAP HANA-optimized improves performance even further.

  • Load processes in SAP HANA-optimized Data Warehouse objects can be processed with a high degree of efficiency. Better performance can be achieved when loading data, for example, by the optimized execution of transformations directly in SAP HANA, or when activating DataStore object data by moving functions to the SAP HANA database.

• SAP HANA as the platform

  SAP HANA as a platform offers functions that can be used in SAP BW, such as SAP HANA Predictive Analysis Library functions in the SAP HANA analysis process, or SAP HANA Smart Data Access, which allows access to external data as though it was "local" data.