High level steps of using SAP HANA and BI 4.0 tools

Fetching Data from SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 03 (High Performance Analytic Appliance)

HANA Architecture. HANA is the complete stack of SAP-certified hardware configurations with pre-installed ICE and some other software components. E.g. SAP HANA 1.0 will have Sybase Replication Server pre-installed.

Sybase Replication Server - pre-installed in HANA 1.0 - will allow almost real-time replication of data from SAP ERP or CRM into ICE for further analysis. This real-time data from operational system can be mashed up in HANA with data from BW or some other 3rd party applications. For the latter data is not replicated, but loaded into ICE using SAP Business Objects Data Services.

The SAP HANA database is an appliance that hosts the In-memory computing engine, which leverage technologies such as columnar storage, massive parallel processing and data compressions techniques (like Run-length encoding, Cluster encoding and Dictionary encoding).

HANA Studio is the front end software delivered with HANA, to be installed on hardware other than the HANA appliance. SAP HANA studio enables administration of HANA database and modeling of data in database.

Three major steps in data flow in HANA:

1.    Loading data into HANA from an existing data source

2.    Modeling data in HANA Studio to facilitate data analysis

3.    Analyze data in HANA database using BI tools.

Two methods of loading data into HANA database:

• SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT using Sybase replication server; real time loading).SLT can be used to move data from an SAP ERP database or any SAP supported database into SAP HANA. The replication is done in real-time, so changes in the original data source are immediately replicated to HANA database. 

       

• SAP Business Object Data Services 4.0 can be used to move data from any data source into SAP HANA. This provides both data replication and data transformation functionality. The data is loaded to HANA in scheduled batches.

         

     

Modeling:

HANA studio can be used to create views (analytic and calculation views). We can also use Information Design Tool to create universes based on HANA data.

Using the information design tool we can build universes (UNX) that are stored in the repository. Universes are the semantic layers that facilitate analysis of important data, by hiding unnecessary technical complexities in the underlying data from the end users. Relational universes can be build on top of HANA tables.

Another way is to create relational universes on top of views in HANA database instead of tables. This allows us to use the modeling work done with HANA studio. Analytical views can be viewed under _SYS_BIC schema; we can see all views defined in the schema of user _SYS_BIC; format will be <package>/<model view>.

Analyzing data in SAP HANA:

SAP Business Object BI suit of products

SAP Crystal reports 2008 and SAP Crystal reports 2011 can connect directly to tables of HANA to create formatted reports.

SAP Business Objects Explorer 4.0 and SAP Business Object Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office, version 1.1 SP03, can connect to the views in HANA (Microsoft Excel 2007 is also able to connect to views in HANA).

  

SAP Business Object Web Intelligence 4.0, Crystal Reports for Enterprise 4.0 use relational universes to connect to HANA database for report analysis and visualization (the universe can be based on tables and views)