Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Author Note: I realize that SAPPHIRE is old news by now, but I felt this post still had enough to offer that I would finish and publish it.

As a technical guy myself, I tend to prefer the SAP Business Objects conference or SAP TechEd over SAPPHIRE, mostly because I find more technical content at those events. However, the Wednesday keynote address from Vishal Sikka and Hasso Plattner of SAP certainly gave me plenty to chew on from a technical perspective.

Vishal Sikka

Vishal kicked off the keynote talking about HANA, and continued that theme throughout his entire (long!) presentation. In a prior post about the conference I answered the question, “what is HANA, exactly?” very simply: HANA is a database. It can be presented in a number of different ways, but ultimately that’s the function that HANA provides. I don’t install HANA to provide new functionality. In order to do anything with it, I need what I have started calling “HANA Plus One” instead. The “plus one” can be Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, or any other query tool. It can also be application code. HANA is an accelerator or an enabler. With HANA I can do the same things I did before but much faster. Or quite possibly I can now do something I wasn’t able to do before because the process took too long. (True story: A very long time ago I was asked to optimize a daily report that was taking 20+ hours to run. By the time the report was finished it was too late. With a few report tweaks and one additional database index I got the report down to 20 seconds.) Continue reading “SAPPHIRE 2011 Wednesday Keynote – HANA, HANA, and More HANA”