Explaining Data Provisioning Technology of SAP HANA

There are two versions of SAP HANA:

• SAP HANA, platform edition - this is the on-premise version and we will refer to this as SAP HANA on-premise, just to be clear
• SAP HANA Cloud - this is the cloud version

SAP HANA on-premise was introduced in 2010. SAP HANA on-premise includes not only an in-memory, column-store database, but many other database-related components and add-ins to support the development and running of custom applications. As well as a platform for developing custom applications, SAP HANA on-premise powers many SAP on-premise applications, such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA to provide fast and highly scalable database storage and retrieval.

Following the successful launch of SAP HANA on-premise, SAP later offered SAP HANA in the cloud. The solution is called SAP HANA Cloud and is based on a subscription model where customers pay only for what they consume.

SAP HANA Cloud is a set of services with the main service being the in-memory, column store database. Other services are available and these closely align with the additional features found in SAP HANA on-premise. SAP HANA Cloud is a member of SAP's technology platform known as SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

Some customers started with SAP HANA on-premise and later migrated to SAP HANA Cloud. But many customers run both SAP HANA on-premise and also SAP HANA Cloud. They often do this to provide elasticity to their on-premise applications in case more storage or CPU is needed. As you would expect, SAP HANA on-premise and SAP HANA Cloud work seamlessly together.

SAP HANA on-premise and SAP HANA Cloud, feature heavily in this course. They both provide features and functions that support data provisioning. Many features are identical, some are similar, and some are unique to one edition or the other. We’ll be clear when we mean SAP HANA on-premise or SAP HANA Cloud. If we mean both editions, we’ll simply use SAP HANA.

To support the development of applications using SAP HANA, we need tooling.

The development tool of SAP HANA on-premise is Web IDE for SAP HANA (often referred to in this course simply as Web IDE). The development tool for SAP HANA Cloud is SAP Business Application Studio. Both are browser-based tools.

Web IDE is installed locally on your server whereas SAP Business Application Studio is a service of SAP BTP that you subscribe to.

Note

It’s technically possible to use SAP Business Application Studio with SAP HANA on-premise. This could be useful if your development includes both editions of SAP HANA and you prefer to work with one interface.

Web IDE provides code editors, graphical modeling tools, debuggers, run-time performance tools, code libraries and an SQL console. Web IDE is fully integrated with Git for source code version control.

SAP Business Application Studio provides all the features of Web IDE, but significantly more. SAP Business Application Studio is based on the industry standard, open-source Microsoft Visual Studio. In addition to the SAP provided features, there's a huge library of third-party plug-ins and extensions to support the developer. SAP Business Application Studio provides many advanced developer productivity aids such as code completion. SAP Business Application Studio also includes a command line interface (CLI).

There are three components of SAP HANA that relate to data provisioning:

• Smart data access: SAP HANA smart data access is used to set up remote data access. This means that data is accessed from remote sources, such as external databases, as if it were stored in local tables in SAP HANA. Smart data access supports access and integration of data from multiple remote systems in real-time. This approach is often referred to as virtualization. Smart data access technology is included with SAP HANA on-premise and SAP HANA Cloud. Smart data access uses the well-known ODBC technology.
  Note

  SAP HANA Cloud also supports REST API for Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery.
• Smart data integration: SAP HANA smart data integration is a set of functions provided by several components to retrieve data from an external system and then optionally transform and persist that data in SAP HANA database tables. Smart data integration is relevant for SAP HANA on-premise and also SAP HANA Cloud.
• Smart data quality: SAP HANA smart data quality is a set of functions provided by several components to cleanse and enrich data before it’s persisted in the SAP HANA database. SAP HANA smart data quality is relevant for SAP HANA on-premise but not for SAP HANA Cloud. For SAP HANA Cloud, a subset of SAP HANA smart data quality capabilities is provided by a subscription-based microservice called Data Quality Management Microservices (DQMm).

Note

The acronyms SDA, SDI and SDQ are often used but these are not official SAP names.