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.)

Vishal also talked about a HANA system that would cost about a half-million dollars that was able to handle 460B (that’s a “B” as in billion) database records. He called it the “perfect non-disruptive technology” because it bolts onto the back end of BW or Business Objects or… whatever. Stuff that worked before still works, it just works faster. (HANA supports both MDX and SQL query languages.) His presentation continued with a lot of customer testimonials, such as one from Colgate-Palmolive. They use HANA for sales planning and profitability analysis. Processes that used to take well over an hour ran in 13 seconds. He also showed customer testimonials related to analyzing traffic for a taxi company in Japan and margin analysis for Infosys. There were probably a dozen or more testimonials in all; after a while I got bored and stopped taking notes because they were all variations on a theme.

At one point Vishal appeared to want to emphasize that HANA was not developed in a vacumm; they used partners whenever possible. He gave as an example the history of innovation with Intel to optimize CPU logic and memory management. Intel now has chips with 10 cores, 30MB of cache, and support up to 4TB of main memory. The partnership with Intel is a win-win. SAP gets a platform to sell more software, and Intel gets demand for top-line hardware.

Towards the end of his session Vishal mentioned that Adobe was going to be using a HANA-based system to evaluate what he called “unintended license usage” of their products. 😉 They didn’t share details about that, of course.

Hasso Plattner

Hasso then took the stage, after Vishal had run well over his allocated time. Hasso was quite the comedian! He commented that since Vishal took much of his time, he would have to present everything in accelerated fashion, and coined the term “HANA Speak” followed by a bunch of gibberish that sounded like the Chipmunks after espresso. I saw more than one tweet related to that joke. 🙂

Hasso took some prearranged questions via video clips. One that I was the most interested in (and therefore took notes about) was related to how reliable could a HANA-based system be, considering it’s all based on RAM. Hasso had a very good answer… he basically said why should we care. 🙂 The concept of caching is not new. I remember buying products years ago that made use of my personal computer RAM to cache commonly accessed information. Today my CPU has a cache, my hard drive has a cache, my video card has cache, heck I would not be surprised if my cache has a cache! Hasso’s point was that all systems today will cache data, but we’re relying on the database to be smart enough to manage that process. HANA doesn’t try to be smart. Instead it takes the brute-force approach and caches everything.

When my Oracle or Teradata (or any other) system is power cycled, the cache starts out empty and has to be reloaded. If a HANA system is powered off and back on again, the cache also has to be reloaded. It’s just a bigger cache.

Hasso then proceeded to show three different HANA systems. The first was HANA running on a Mac Mini (he called it a Mini-Mac, which inspired several folks around me to make McDonalds references). By the way, don’t bother looking for the Mac Mini on the hardware support list. 🙂 It runs a custom port of the code which is not (to my knowledge) commercially available. But Hasso wanted to talk about the fact that entire companies were running on this system. Imagine being able to run your entire company application suite on hardware that small! The next system Hasso showed was a rack with some pizza boxes (blades) which is probably the more typical configuration. Finally, we went live to a data center that showed (if my memory is correct) a 1,000 CPU system. Impressive stuff, all done to show the scalability of HANA.

Keep in mind what I said earlier though… HANA isn’t a product that helps you make better business decisions, build prettier graphs, or deliver mobile solutions. It is an accelerator / enabler for all of these. It’s a database. Along those lines, SAP is taking steps to be able to run their ERP on top of HANA. The first module I heard about for this was their planning application. As Hasso put it, planning is all about seeing the future. HANA gives you brighter headlights so you can see farther and drive faster.

One final moment of amusement came when Hasso was looking at one of his slides and describing the various elements, and could not remember what the “ASIS” acronym stood for. Then he remembered that he was speaking in English and was able to put “as-is applications” into context. 😆 That goes back to Vishal’s comment about HANA being non-disruptive. In a theoretical situation, I don’t have to change a single thing about my business processes, reporting, or mobility solutions in order to use HANA. Anything currently in place will continue to run as it currently stands (as is). Nice idea in theory, of course, but I’m sure that in practice there might be one or two things that need tweaking. 😉

Conclusion

As I mentioned previously, the three hot items for the conference this year were mobility, cloud, and in-memory computing. Mobile devices require fast response times or they’re not useful. I can’t sit at a client site for 30 minutes waiting for a report to run or an analytic to refresh, I need it now. HANA helps me get there, and SAP is obviously very proud of their technology. I expect to hear (and see) quite a bit about this over the coming years. Perhaps even to the point where we can paraphrase Scotty (from Star Trek IV) and say:

Hard disks, how quaint.