Study of SAP Hana in the in-memory context

Abstract

Information Systems have a crucial part on the management of any company, being one of the factors that enhance the competitive edge, through thoughtful analysis and fast process of information. IS can be used for example, for stock control and overview, account receivables, profits and losses, balance sheets, among other factors. Some of these companies have huge Human Resources department, millions of transactions per day, several departments who need to communicate with each other, and access to databases are made almost every second, where some of them are complex queries that can take hours to materialize. To answer to some of these problems, SAP, the German software company, created Hana, a software platform, based on a new database based 100% on memory, allowing an improvement on access's performances up to one hundred times faster. In spite of everyone in the area having knowledge that this technology can bring several advantages to organizations, it's not yet clear what advantages are and how they can leverage a business's performance, because speed may not be enough to justify an investment in such an expensive technology. In the course of this dissertation, the objective is to answer what is the concrete business value to an organization, what can be improved and why an investment in the in-memory technology can be asset, over the old databases on persistent memory. In a more practical view, there will be made an analysis on data from exportations of every country since 1963 (about 103M records).. The main subject of analysis will be analysis of performance time both in Hana as in R/3, and see the difference in deep tables . In the end, the objective is to extract some general conclusions from this analysis, which could be transferred to other areas, but of course, with a certain level of abstraction. To sum up, the point of this dissertation is how the technical specifications of Hana can leverage the business value of this technology. Since investing in a new platform like this one always involve a considerable investment, organizations need to have thoughtful analysis vantages and disadvantages, the pros and cons., from a technical point of view. In spite small improvements instead of big changes is a prudent step, in this case I believe the technology is so disruptive that the faster the organizations adopt, the advantages will be a crucial factor to gain advantage over competition.