Does SAP use internally BW on HANA?

Yes SAP runs SAP and BW on HANA. This is fact.

What has happened since the last blog: The setup of the SAP NetWeaver BW powered by HANA system landscape is progressing. Two BW 7.30 SP5 systems are now running on a HANA SP3 database and we are preparing the migration for the 3rd and last system in the 3-tier landscape. The focus until now was very much to successfully migrate the systems and to establish first reporting solutions. In the next four weeks we will also establish monitoring, support and operations processes for the business usage. Business go-live is not far away.

At the end we need to have an end-to-end operations framework to manage the BusinessObjects Intelligence 4.0 platform with mobile capabilities, the SAP Business Warehouse powered by HANA and HANA by-side sources in a holistic way. The business expectations on stability and performance will be very high and High Availability and Disaster Recovery capabilities are a must. It is too early to speak about the details, but I will share the concept in another blog in some weeks.

One thing I can tell already today: We are running the HANA on a certified single server as of today. We used one of the largest machines you could order at that point in time, but it will not be sufficient for our future needs. Not in terms of memory, not in terms of scalability and not in terms of failover capabilities. At least not in the production environment. Very soon we will move to a certified distributed server scenario. I can’t share hardware details yet, but you should speak to your preferred hardware vendor to learn more about the next generation.

Now let me introduce one of the new reporting solutions, which has been build (yes, it is ‘has been’, not ‘will be’) in this environment, the ‘Automated Deal Roadmap’. This is the business description: The Automated Deal Roadmap (ADRM) provides a single authoritative source for all sales forecasting for sales executives at all levels. ADRM provides full transparency of both actual recognized revenue combined with Sales pipeline to provide a consolidated view of the sales goal and potential to simplify managing and achieving sales revenue targets in an efficient and cost effective manner.

High-level source and data model picture for ADRM solution
ADRM on BI Mobile for TechEd Demo

ADRM is using the entire environment: Sales pipeline data are read out of the HANA by-side CRM (from BW application stack via 2nd connection directly from HANA DB), financial COPA data are read out of the HANA by-side ECC, master data are staged in BW powered by HANA and joined together within BW in a new type of virtual infoprovider. BW provides also some other features on-the-fly: Currency conversion and analysis authorizations. The reporting is available via BICS connection in BusinessObjects 4.0 solutions on desktop or mobile. This the perfect proof point to demonstrate a complete new generation of analytics solutions, but also to design new processes and concepts on IT side to manage those. This is truly changing the game.

SAP HANA Rules Framework

Welcome to the SAP HANA Rules Framework (HRF) Community Site!

SAP HANA Rules Framework provides tools that enable application developers to build solutions with automated decisions and rules management services, implementers and administrators to set up a project/customer system, and business users to manage and automate business decisions and rules based on their organizations' data.

In daily business, strategic plans and mission critical tasks are implemented by a countless number of operational decisions, either manually or automated by business applications. These days - an organization's agility in decision-making becomes a critical need to keep up with dynamic changes in the market.

HRF Main Objectives are:

• To seize the opportunity of Big Data by helping developers to easily build automated decisioning solutions and\or solutions that require business rules management capabilities
• To unleash the power of SAP HANA by turning real time data into intelligent decisions and actions
• To empower business users to control, influence and personalize decisions/rules in highly dynamic scenarios

SAP HANA Data Architecture and Security Concept (Part: 2)

First part of this blog can be found here:

SAP HANA - Security Concept and Data Architecture (part 1)

This second part is describing concept of roles and how to use SQL interface to define security objects.

9 Role definitions

Roles should be designed using role hierarchy ability of HANA database. First you should create elementary roles for each schema/package. These can be then directly assigned to users or can be orchestrated together to form higher level roles based on type of the user.

Role can be created using simple syntax:

     CREATE ROLE <role name>

9.1 Elementary roles - SQL privileges

We will design following roles addressing SQL privileges:

• role DATA_*_READ having privilege to SELECT
• role DATA_*_WRITE having privilege to INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and EXECUTE
• role DATA_*_DDL having privilege to CREATE ANY, ALTER, DROP, INDEX

As result we will need to crate these roles:

• role DATA_SLT_IDD800_READ
• role DATA_SLT_IDD800_WRITE
• role DATA_SLT_IDD800_DDL
• role DATA_SLT_IDE800_READ
• role DATA_SLT_IDE800_WRITE
• role DATA_SLT_IDE800_DDL
• role DATA_BODS_TESTING_READ
• role DATA_BODS_TESTING_WRITE
• role DATA_BODS_TESTING_DDL
• role DATA_MAN_TESTING_READ
• role DATA_MAN_TESTING_WRITE
• role DATA_MAN_TESTING_DDL
• role DATA_MAN_COPA_READ
• role DATA_MAN_COPA_WRITE
• role DATA_MAN_COPA_DDL

SAP HANA Data Architecture and Security Concept (Part: 1)

1 Introduction

This blog is written against HANA database revision 16.

Security concept in HANA database is slightly different from other enterprise databases. These differences are introducing certain considerations that must be taken into account when creating data architecture of HANA database.

Goal of this blog is to share approach how HANA database can be designed to separate different users from each other without impacting their ability to collaborate.

The reader is expected to download and read at least following SAP guide before reading this document.

SAP HANA 1.0 - SAP In-Memory Database - Security Guide

http://help.sap.com/hana/hana1_imdb_sec_en.pdf

Note: This design does not cover considerations related to SLT replication. This will be addressed by another blog.

2 Security limitations

As mentioned before, the HANA security model differs from other enterprise databases like DB2 or Oracle, making it a special case indeed.

First “problem” is that HANA is extremely rigid in SQL privileges. You need to have corresponding grant privilege for any activity you wish to grant. While this concept is very logical it might cause some problems. Initially only the schema creator is having required privileges and therefore only he can grant them (including granting “privilege to grant it further”). Unfortunately there is no “power user” that would be exception to this rule. This leads to unpleasant situation that only owner can delegate his own SQL privileges which might be big problem in case he is not aware how to do this.

This design feature can be addressed by separating data owners from application users and from modelers. Dedicated technical users (owned by system administrator) will be holding the data and all other users (modelers and application users) will have corresponding privileges to access the data. Modelers should not create any content within their own schema - they should always work inside data owner’s schema. (This can be achieved by deleting user’s own schema.)

Second consideration is common practice to not grant any privileges directly to users but to grant them via roles. Unfortunately without ROLE ADMIN system privilege you cannot adjust the role (because you will not be able to see it) and grant it SQL privilege as explained above.

This point is also solved by having separate data owner users that you can control yourself. You can grant them ROLE ADMIN privilege, do required changes and then again revoke ROLE ADMIN system privilege. Alternatively you can use SQL interface where this problem does not exist.

Power of SAP HANA in the Era of Technology

The possibility of digital technology in every way has made today's world more resplendent and creative. The evolution of future systems and technologies is proportional to the improvisations of digital world and its database. Reducing the time taken to convert the prototype to a complete product, standardizing the components used and implementing portability were the key factors that constitute improvement in digital world. For instance, above factors influenced the consistent double-digit growth of mobile industry.

Improvising digital world

Digital world is veiled with huge databases, interfaces and high-end applications. In spite of being advanced, it is complicated to maintain such a globalized technology. Improvements in digital world depend on the enhancements in the processing capability and architecture of its database and interfaces. Like any other technology, speed and portability were the key factors for a technology to take a leap towards success. Today's world demands these features in each and every product from the IT industry.

How to Setup Google Glass Quick Start Demo on HANA

At the end of the operations we will deploy demo to Hana Cloud Platform. Then users will authorize via created url on cloud platform. After successful login, current timestamp, name and location of user are saved to Hana Database and a timelinecard is posted with the last logged in users data.

Deploy Quick Start Demo:

There is two major task to deploy demo

Creating a Google APIs Console project:

Google has a detail tutorial to create a console project. You can follow the instructions.

The created client ID and client secret for my project:

Importing project to hana studio

Download attached .war file and import project into Hana studio. (If you want to try Quick start demo independently from Hana studio, please download .zip file, import it as archieve project into eclipse)

Data Archiving From HANA Improve Business Information

SAP HANA is a relational database management system that stores data in memory rather than on traditional hard disks. It is used in conjunction with "big data" for accelerating business processes, data processing, and analytics.

We're not talking about a few gigabytes of data, we're talking about terabytes and petabytes in some cases. When stored traditionally, gleaning insights from the massive amounts of data stored on hard disks takes time - and it can lead to bandwidth issues. With SAP HANA, a business's dat - even multiple terabytes of it - is stored on in a memory where it can be accessed instantly. The ability to gather information in real time is one of SAP HANA's biggest selling points.

Absolute Advantage of SAP HANA

Make better decisions, faster, with SAP HANA! To this point, I wanted to take some time to write about a several of the essential perks that SAP HANA will bring in to an organization. HANA integrates with ongoing data found in the conventional ERP systems and is not bound to aggregated figures like what is currently required by BW. Here is an example of how traditional OLTP and OLAP systems are impaired when we talk about reporting. BW may gather Purchase Order header data in order to do reporting, in doing so, ends up missing Purchase Order item information. If you wish to run reports on much more elaborate data, end users will be able to get richer insights into their reasoning and make more enlightened decisions. In a business without SAP HANA, the finance reporting team is called to write ad-hoc queries to champion governance decisions. In addition to normal report work, Business Warehouse administrators are required to marry data from unsimilar sources. This can take weeks, sometimes months to wind up at an cognizant outcome derived from manual query creation. This is immensely inefficient.

Virtually all data sources are accessible through SAP HANA

By leveraging SAP HANA reporting, which also allows combination of external information, the turnaround time for ad-hoc analysis will greatly decrease. This allows the Business team to react immensely faster to business demands.