When I traveled through time using SAP HANA!!

(This blog first appeared on SCN website http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana/blog/2013/02/12/when-i-travelled-through-time-using-sap-hana) 

When I traveled through time using SAP HANA!!

Yes! SAP HANA can make time travel happen. Literally!!

During our exploration of SAP HANA, we found that SAP has made time travel possible via SAP HANA. This is because SAP HANA runs on SAP In-Memory Computing Engine, which provides support for History Tables. These tables, known as 'HISTORY COLUMN' tables, have session type as ‘HISTORY’ and they support time travel queries.

‘Time travel’ queries are the queries against historical states of the database. In a way, it allows to fetch the historical values (say, some inventory statistics for date 1 Jan 2011 in the table CURRENT_INVENTORY), without actually having to load the data from backups taken on 1 Jan 2011.

This concept (and specially this emotional touch of TRAVELLING through time) caught us, and we ended up exploring this concept in the following manner. All the steps and information sources were duly documented, so that other interested enthusiasts can also enjoy this experience in their own labs.

Following is the basic procedure for using Time Travel Queries in SAP HANA:

1. Create History Tables
2. Turn Auto Commit Off
3. Keep track of commit IDs (or connection IDs) dealing with the History tables
4. Execute Time Travel Queries on the History Tables

For more details about these steps, see the blog http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana/blog/2013/02/12/when-i-travelled-through-time-using-sap-hana 

Conclusion

For demonstration purposes, implementing time travel seems to be bit easy task. But in real life scenarios, implementation would be much more complex, and would demand entire new set of plans and designs for fully utilizing this new concept.

We would love to hear more about real life scenarios where this concept could make a real difference. So do provide your feedback and suggestions about this topic.

References

·         0204 - Modeling - Time Travel Example.pdf, available as a zipped content at http://www.experiencesaphana.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadBody/2171-102-4-4396/SAPHANA_TechnicalDocumentsV2.zip

·         http://help.sap.com/hana/html/sql_select.html

·         http://help.sap.com/hana/html/sql_create_table_history_time_travel.html

SAP HANA with more cloud options

Since my last blog post on SAP's innovation spree about SAP HANA and then SAP HANA on AWS, SAP continues to further expand its strong application service portfolio by joining hands with more cloud vendors. After launching its HANA cloud services on Amazon Web Services (AWS), SAP now provides SAP HANA One Developer edition on KT ucloud, CloudShare and Portugal Telecom’s SmartCloudPT. And these service providers seems to be providing the SAP HANA as a Service (sounds interesting !!) even at lower price marks than AWS.

The detailed list of provided services and charges are available here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31722

But for a quick reference, a summary of cloud service offerings (taken from above mentioned link) are provided in below table:

Cloud Partner	Description	Instance Types	Price
Amazon Web Services	Amazon provides a secure, scalable, and highly elastic cloud infrastructure for running SAP HANA. With AWS there is no need to procure IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance, but it can be done within minutes. It can also be scaled based on workload or on-demand, and pay only for the resources used. There is no SAP charge for the SAP HANA One developer edition license, only AWS account usual charges apply. The AWS flexible and open platform supports a wide variety languages and operating systems so you can choose the development platform or programming model that best suits your needs. Utilize other AWS cloud infrastructure services as well as a host of other third-party development tools already available on AWS. AWS provides a massive global cloud infrastructure that allows you to quickly innovate, experiment and iterate.	2 vCPU's, 17.1GB RAM 154GB disk 4 vCPU's, 34.2GB RAM 154GB disk 8 vCPU's, 68.4GB RAM 154GB disk	starting from $0.55 / hour
CloudShare	Get SAP HANA One, developer edition in the cloud – with CloudShare. Flat $137 per month cost - no overages, no time limits Includes SAP HANA Server and pre-configured developer environment (24 GB RAM). No IT, no VPN are required	4 vCPU's, 22 GB, 150 GB disk Plus one remote desktop with Windows 7, 1 vCPU, 2 GB, 20 GB disk (HANA studio, client, additional tools)	$137 / month
SmartCloudPT	SAP HANA One, developer edition in SmartCloudPT provides simple and immediate access to a configured SAP HANA development environment, with community support from SAP, running on the enterprise-grade SmartCloudPT infrastructure. The service fee is prepaid using a credit card and can be renewed at the end of each month. Fixed monthly pricing for the service starts at 159€/month for a 16GB RAM cloud instance. Unlike other public clouds, pricing is fixed per month and fully inclusive, with no hidden costs or surcharges! All environments run on the latest, enterprise-grade infrastructure and come with 24/7 instance availability.	4 vCPU's, 16GB RAM, 200GB disk 6 vCPU's, 32GB RAM, 300GB disk	starting from €159 / month
KT ucloud biz	Take a personal SAP HANA One, developer edition on kt ucloud within 5 minutes Can be accessible all over the world, geographically very close to east and south east Asia On-demand provisioning of HANA VM instance to the maximum size of 16vcore/128G Both hourly and monthly payment can be available as requested 4VM-clustered HANA landscape as well as 1VM (16vcore/120G) on one physical host is now available	2 vCPU's, 16GB RAM, 90GB disk 4 vCPU's, 32GB RAM, 140GB disk 8 vCPU's, 64GB RAM, 230GB disk 16 vCPU's, 128GB RAM, 420GB disk 16 vCPU's, 120GB RAM, 420GB disk on dedicated server	starting from $0.286 / hour

 

Also,  very good comparison of pricing between SAP HANA appliance vs SAP HANA service on AWS cloud is made by Bill Ramos in his interesting blog post here.
This comparison is based on the fact that SAP HANA One Developer edition is provided FREE of charge by SAP for 1 month trial basis. So there are no charges for using SAP HANA on cloud, only the standard cloud usage charges applies.

SAP HANA on AWS.

In previous few blogs, there are very quick introductions about the SAP, one of the world’s largest vendors of independent enterprise software, and its latest innovation marvel for enterprises, SAP HANA.
Now they have brought this effort one step more forward, by bringing SAP HANA on Cloud.
Yes, SAP's  in-memory database and platform capabilities are now available in form of a pay-as-you-go commodity by Amazon Web Services.

What it means: So now if some organization has need of fast processing power, but is hesitant in making huge investments in purchasing the entire in-house solution (SAP HANA appliance is really costly !!), then they can opt for this option and use it for the desired time. It like, just pay the rent of a Huge Villa, and enjoy living there for the time you want.

Advantages: Enterprises seeking some fast processing solutions for its regularly recurring (but not frequently  occurring ) tasks, like processing the payrolls for all employees at end of every month, or analyzing the sales trends to prepare for a specific event, can take advantages of this time based solution.

At first looks, this idea seems to be a fast, stable and reliable business solution, but things from far as just visible nice. There may be potential factors like massive data transfers, additional hidden charges/add-ons required, that might be involved. But all factors apart, This solution provides some promising future for the Software as a Service (SaaS) market.

The pricing details are available here.
For more in-depth technical details, visit SAP's website here.

SAP HANA is real real-time technology

Why is SAP HANA so fast?

In recent time, SAP released its incredible innovative idea of In-Memory Computing for providing real-real time computing, along with an appliance SAP HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance). It is claimed to be a game changing innovation, which has forced other vendors to take a step forward and jump into this dimension of technology.

As claimed by SAP, the HANA appliance achieved outstanding statistical figures:

• Ability to scan 2 million records per millisecond per core and over 10 million complex aggregations calculated on the fly per second per core.
• Full parallelization at 1,000 cores and beyond
• 450 billion record system implemented on less than three terabytes of physical memory.

An explainination of this outstanding performance, as given by John Appleby, Head of Business Analytics & Technology, Bluefin Solutions stands as:

"Regular RDBMS technologies put the information on spinning plates of iron (hard disks) from which the information is retrieved. HANA stores information in electronic memory, which is some 50x faster (depending on how you calculate). HANA stores a copy on magnetic disk, in case of power failure or the like. In addition, most SAP systems have the database on one system and a calculation engine on another, and they pass information between them. With HANA, this all happens within the same machine."

(content taken from publicly available information available here)

This really shows a good potential of a game changing technology breakthrough, forcing vendors to work on the In-memory concept. And if this continues in the same fashion, one day, everyone will be having a super computer (as we know them today) into the pockets of common people.