Some people think bad things come in three, but I like to think of three as a good number. After all, three 7s on a slot machine reel means you’re a winner. A hat trick in hockey means a player scores three goals in one game. And a three-piece suit looks sharp.
So I think it’s great news for readers of BI Expert that we’ve recently posted three new articles about SAP HANA. If you’re not familiar with HANA, this is a nice opportunity to educate yourself. It’s clear that HANA and other in-memory technologies will be on the minds of many BI and IT executives in the coming years.
BI Expert’s new HANA offerings include:
- A look at the two different versions of HANA available (SAP HANA 1.0 and SAP HANA 1.0 Support Package 03). In his article, author George Campbell-Kelly of Bluefin Solutions compares HANA to SAP NetWeaver BW Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). “SAP HANA can be the underlying technology that a SAP NetWeaver BW system runs on, whereas a BWA is a separate system that augments an existing SAP NetWeaver BW system, improving its performance,” Campbell-Kelly writes.
- The potential business benefits when HANA runs on top of SAP NetWeaver BW, as explained by Prakash Darji of SAP. “For the business, the key changes are improved reporting performance, real-time data access, and the ability to simulate and plan faster,” Darji writes.
- In a follow-up article by Darji written from an IT perspective, how HANA can reduce time spent on loading, maintenance, and modeling. For example, with HANA, companies can more rapidly change data models by dragging and dropping dimension in and out of InfoCubes.
True, there is a lot of hype following HANA around, but Campbell-Kelly takes the position that HANA is the culmination of a decade’s worth of technology changes. “SAP HANA brings the potential to improve corporate systems on a massive scale — and on a level similar to the move from mainframe to client-server, or magnetic tape to disk storage,” he writes.
Watch for further SAP HANA coverage in BI Expert soon. Meanwhile, if you’re a subscriber, log in at the top of this page to read the full versions of all three articles. If you don't subscribe, check out the benefits of reading BI Expert.
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