Real-time reporting with SAP HANA

Cloud computing! In-memory database and computing! Will the cloud change the way we used to put the data together? Change the architecture of a OLAP system? Will the reporting rock with the OLTP system directly someday? Forget about Business Intelligence! Forget about Data Warehousing! At least we could make some wild dreams now already with SAP’s new product HANA (High-Performance Analysis Applience)!

Lenovo Group should be the first-ever SAP HANA customer all accross China. Weeks ago I went there to join a small PoC (Prove of Concept) project, which was to show how we could utilize the HANA product’s features based on current reporting requirement from Lenovo. The test at Lenovo shows that with HANA the performance would increase hunderds times than using the normal BW-BOBJ framework. Many congratulations to Lenovo also because they have passed the Hardware Certification as a hardware partner with SAP HANA. Before there were only HP and IBM certified.

A simple demo video (http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/lN2PalC0jvc/) shows what we basically realized during the project. When customer’s US sales managers checks the Opportunities in status ‘Open’ – lively generated opportunities – from Florida is less than that from California. He would immediately pick up his phone and stregthern his sales force in Florida to make some change! As you could see in the demo video, the two new created opportunities will make Florida’s whole ‘Expected Sales Revenue‘ increase 500,000 USD, after this two new created opportunities were saved, the reporting would be refreshed in seconds! The manager has no need to ask his associate maybe to provide him the ‘blabla’ report before the coffee-break in the afternoon but rather observer the increase and update already while reading his morning news-paper!!!

Believe it or not, cloud/in-memory computing will change the world. With clouding computing, the way we organize data would be severely impacted. Just think about it! Why do we need to introduce Star-Schema in all kinds of Business Warehouse systems? Performance! Data Volume! To avoid redundent data! But you should always bear in mind that actually this didn’t stop the data redundent because to do the ETL and data cleaning, you have already make several copies of your raw data, right?

With HANA, in the future, we would see high-performance reporting on the transaction data directly! Even the application solutions would also runs on HANA directly.

But it will take some time to see that HANA replacing current relation-database, maybe 5 years, maybe 15. Who knows, in IT world, you could never image how soon a new technology could be explored and rock the world!

Check more details about SAP HANA @ http://www.sap.com/platform/in-memory-computing/index.epx

Any question/discussion, please contact me via @雷蒙德张 on http://weibo.com or send mail to raymondzhang1987@gmail.com.