SAP HANA 2.0 - An Introduction

Getting Started with SAP HANA

In this blog series you will find quotes, backgrounds, suggested further readings and other information related to my latest book SAP HANA 2.0, An Introduction published by SAP Press > https://www.sappress.com/4884 (also available at Amazo

Getting Started

Hi, I am new to Hana. Could you please tell where to get started?

With almost 60,000 subscribers on the SAP HANA Academy and 15,000 connections on LinkedIn, we receive a fair amount of messages and this particular question is by far number one on the FAQ.

Tutorials

Of course, the SAP HANA Academy on YouTube is a great place to learn with, as advertised, "1,000s of free tutorial videos" (a little over 2,000 to be precise). However, the Academy is like a big library and when you just walk in you may feel a little bit overwhelmed. As with most things Google, search is the best approach to find anything. Which raises the question: to get started, where exactly do we search on?

The hands-on tutorials on the SAP Developer Center provide another great place to learn and their Tutorial Navigatormakes a bit easier to find the right topic. However, as with the Academy, you will need to be a bit familiar with SAP HANA to use the navigator (or search) effectively.

Training

For guided training, we can follow the learning journeys from SAP Training. These journeys bundle recommended courses with different tracks for development and administration. Unlike the Academy and the Developer Center, this concerns "premium" content as you will need a subscription to the SAP Learning Hub. Without corporate sponsorship and benevolent management this may not be within reach for all of us.

Cost is no issue when learning with openSAP. Their courses are provided free of charge and make for excellent training material but again, with most courses making a deep dive, this may not be the easiest place to get started.

Documentation

What about the SAP HANA documentation on the SAP Help Portal, then? Well written, well documented, but for the non-initiated this will be TMI (too much information). For the administrator, there are several guides of which the core Administration Guide alone counts well over 2,000 pages. For the developer, there are so many guides (21 on last count), that two more guides were added for guidance: Information Map and Quick Start. And this only concerns SAP HANA on-premise. For SAP HANA in the cloud, HANA as-a-service, there is a different topic area on the portal with more documentation.

SAP HANA 2.0 - An Introduction

For those new to SAP HANA, as author, I can personally recommend SAP Press's SAP HANA 2.0, an Introduction. In a little over 400 pages, this book provides all the information you need to know to get started with SAP HANA. In each chapter, we put on a different hat and take the perspective of a "persona", as software development managers like to call them. We learn how to get started with SAP HANA as developer, as system administrator, as security architect, data scientist, data integrator, data administrator, data centre architect, and project manager. In the book we cover the technology, the releases, the tools, use cases, road maps, and much more. It will be the quickest way to get everybody on the HANA project on board and on the same page.

But the book was not written just for those new to HANA. As the main focus is on the latest SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 release, it is also a great resource for those familiar with older versions but who would like to get a comprehensive yet digestible update. We explain the differences between native development using XS Advanced versus the classic model, how to administer tenant databases, when to use SAP HANA Studio versus the SAP Web IDE and the SAP HANA Cockpit, and cover persistent memory, native storage extensions, data anonymization, and other 2.0 innovations. Reading the book will give you a solid foundation to digest the next What's New update and put the road maps into context.

Quote/Unquote

Each chapter starts with a quote and in this and upcoming blogs I will provide a bit of background about each of them.

We basically defined the foundation of a radical system – the radicality was no redundant data. Never store data twice … that was the start of Hana.

--Dr. Hasso Plattner

Quote from a Financial Times article, published in 2014.

Without Hasso Plattner there would have been no HANA. The in-memory platform has even been named after him, as Hasso's New Architecture. From its start as research project, its release as appliance, as platform until today as cloud service, Hasso Plattner has been involved in each and every phase.

From Hasso Plattner, SAP’s software pioneer still sailing on - Financial Times, Paul Taylor and Chris Bryant (March 2, 2014).

SAP HANA is the heart and soul of SAP.

--Gerrit Kazmaier, SVP SAP HANA & Analytics

From Latest Version of SAP HANA Empowers All Business Users to Make Confident, Intelligent Decisions Fast - SAP News (April 8, 2019).

Quote is taken from the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 Keynote: "SAP HANA is really not only the heart and soul of SAP’s innovation but also the heart and soul of SAP’s data management strategy" (27:00). 

In the keynote Plattner and Kazmaier discuss the explosion data in the Global Data Sphere: 2,000 exabytes in 2010 at the launch of SAP HANA, 40,000 exabytes in 2019 (0.07 in SAP ERP systems worldwide), going to a predicted 175,000 exabytes in 2025 – and how this impacts the future of SAP HANA-based systems.

Highlights of the keynote are captured in this just-under 10 minute video:

For the others posts, see

• Chapter 1 – An Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Technology Overview
• Chapter 3 – Administration
• Chapter 4 – Development
• Chapter 5 – Advanced Analytics
• Chapter 6 – Security (free sample chapter)
• Chapter 7 – Data Integration
• Chapter 8 – Data Architecture
• Chapter 9 – Data Center Architecture
• Chapter 10 – Training and Support