Help Center> SAP HANA> SAP HANA Overview> Introduction to SAP HANA
View PDF

Introduction to SAP HANA

SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) is a high-performance real-time data computing platform launched by SAP in June 2011. The platform leverages the memory computing technology, which enables users to directly query and analyze a large quantity of real-time business data.

SAP HANA has the following features:

  • Rapid data processing

    SAP HANA data is stored in the in-memory database (IMDB), which features rapid data input/output (I/O). Success stories show that the data processing rate provided by SAP HANA is 1,000 or even 10,000 times faster than that provided by customers' original database systems.

  • Support for online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP)

    OLAP is a main application in data warehouse (DWH) systems. It supports complex analysis, focuses on decision support, and provides query results that are easy to understand.

    OLTP is a main application of traditional relational databases. It processes basic and routine transactions, such as banking transactions.

  • Support for both structured and unstructured data

    Structured data is a type of information represented using a unified structure, such as digits and symbols. The other data that cannot be represented using a unified structure is called unstructured data, such as texts, images, audio, and HTML.

  • Various peripheral application software

    The application software includes data replication (DR) and business intelligence (BI).

  • Structured query language (SQL), multidimensional expressions (MDX), and BI consumer services (BICS) interfaces for the application layer
  • Support for multiple data importing modes

Figure 1 shows the SAP HANA architecture.

Figure 1 SAP HANA architecture

Application Scenarios

SAP HANA applies to following scenarios:

  • Accelerator for other databases
  • Data source for report analysis
  • OLAP DWH
  • OLTP database
  • Unified SAP database platform