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.
