SAP Changes the Data Warehousing Landscape With SAP HANA

SAP Unveils New In-Memory Data Fabric With Latest Version of SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA

To further deliver on SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA, SAP AG is reinventing the data warehouse to deliver real-time, in-context business decisions for everyone while simplifying the IT landscape.  SAP today announced the availability of the 7.4 version of the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) application powered by SAP HANA as part of the new in-memory data architecture. SAP's in-memory data fabric speeds business intelligence to front-line employees, making businesses more productive and competitive in real time while significantly reducing the overhead of duplicating data. Customers are now able to deliver information to their end users more efficiently and react to changing business demands more quickly while simplifying their IT tasks. The announcement was made at HANA2014 being held March 24-27 in Orlando, Florida.

In-Memory Data Fabric Offers Intelligence to Everyone
SAP is changing the market by delivering a logical analytics paradigm instead of the classic data warehousing consolidation. By marshalling any information anywhere in the enterprise or beyond via SAP HANA smart data access technology, the company is delivering on the promise of real-time analytics via data federation at an enterprise scale, helping ensure that complex business questions are answered no matter where the data resides, at the speed of business. With this new in-memory data fabric, SAP is helping create a new class of front-line users with vastly improved decision-making ability.

"SAP has a viable data virtualization offering with SAP HANA at its core," wrote Noel Yuhanna, Principal Analyst, in the August 2013 Forrester Research, Inc. report entitled Information Fabric 3.0. "SAP has a strong data management portfolio comprising data quality, data integration, transformation, ETL, replication, data services, profiling and modeling. Now that SAP is integrating its data management capabilities with SAP HANA in-memory technology, it delivers the most comprehensive in-memory distributed information fabric platform in the industry."

"At Molson Coors, our SAP data warehouse provides mission-critical support for key decisions across the company," said Lyne Strasbourg, Global BI Business Alignment Lead, Molson Coors. "Running SAP BW powered by SAP HANA has led to increased performance in key areas of our data warehouse while significantly simplifying many of the IT tasks. With SAP BW 7.4, we'll be able to deliver information to end users more efficiently and develop new solutions twice as fast."

SAP BW 7.4 powered by SAP HANA Delivers an In-Memory Data Fabric
The in-memory data fabric paradigm is key to the newest version of SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA. SAP Business Warehouse 7.4 becomes the business semantic layer across the enterprise bringing together all data warehousing, analytics and governance activities into a single business context. By simplifying data modelling, data access, data provisioning and governance in the in-memory data fabric, SAP Business Warehouse 7.4 is delivering a real-time end-user experience providing fast, in-context business insights. This new version leverages SAP HANA smart data access technology to enable the end user to virtually incorporate data from any sources or systems without having to physically move the data. SAP Business Warehouse 7.4 extends the push down of data-intensive processes into SAP HANA, such as data transformations, planning and OLAP functions, thereby dramatically improving performance, delivering real-time results and making data loads faster.

"We are completely changing the game for the traditional data warehouse market," said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions Group, SAP.  "By dramatically simplifying, extending and reducing the complexity inherent in traditional data warehouse architectures, SAP BW on SAP HANA will help our customers achieve real-time analytics not possible before."

The power of this solution has already been demonstrated with the earlier announcement of the company's achievement of a Guinness World Record for the largest data warehouse. At over 12 Petabytes, the record is three times larger than the prior record. The scalability of the solution was also demonstrated on a public cloud based solution that loaded 8 million rows per second on 111 SAP HANA instances using 1776 cores. The resulting queries ran in 330 mS, versus single instance performance of 250 mS, demonstrating the ability to scale massively with little impact on performance overhead.