Who or what is HANA?
It all started in 2012, when the word "HANA" was constantly heard in connection with SAP. We at SIGMA were very interested in HANA at that time and almost all of us :-) can no longer imagine life without it. But what exactly is this HANA? In my conversations with our SAP user family, I keep noticing that there are still many question marks and also misunderstandings. This article aims to change that.
Let's briefly start with the theory: HANA stands for High Performance Analytic Appliance and is a development platform from SAP for software applications, which at its core consists of an in-memory database. It is an appliance, i.e. a combination of hardware and software, which uses in-memory technology to utilise the computer's RAM, which is much faster to access than the hard disk, for data storage. Compared to conventional database solutions, it enables evaluations of large data volumes with higher performance and also forms the basis for additional and novel business scenarios in SAP solutions, such as SAP Business One. SAP HANA can be used with different hardware and also virtualised.
Admittedly, this description is so technical and dry that one would prefer to forget it right away. For all non-IT administrators, this is approved ;-)
What is worth remembering, are "additional and novel business scenarios".
Because this is where SAP HANA starts to bring joy to all decision makers in the company. Nowadays, we no longer look for our tasks, but let the software inform us when processes or workflows require processing. And if, in parallel to this, we can still react visually to changes at short notice in the form of deflecting bars or coloured key figures, then this gives us a completely different quality to control the company.
Let us convince you in our part 2 "Boost your productivity with these 9 features" how you can perform even better in the future.
