Demo: SAP HANA, 426 million rows and BusinessObject tools

In this blog we look at a demo of SAP BusinessObjects on HANA with 426 million rows and a BI Workspace with 3 Dashbaords, WebI, Analysis and Crystal Reports. By Dr. Berg

This spring I taught a business intelligence class and SAP HANA at my university where I am a professor. I had 18 computer science and IT majors in the class and decided to pilot the new HANA curriculum at the SAP University Alliance. This demo is based on some of their work.

First, we created four tables for customer, stores, products and sales transactions. Then we kept loading 1.05 million rows to the sales fact table using the BusinessObjects Data Services ETL tool. We re-ran the job with different keys until we had filled the fact table with more than 426,000,000 rows (click on image if you want to see the details)

Figure 1: the Sales Fact Table

Then we created attribute views for customer, store and products as well as an analytical view joining the attribute views to the transactional table. This view is the logical presentation of a star-schema that is used in our dashboards.

 Figure 2: The HANA Analytical View for reporting

We then used 2 sales dashboards on top of the HANA view, and for good measure we added one more dashboard from General ledger that did not use the view, as well as more tools based on Microsoft Analysis Services data sources. This included BusinessObjects WebI report, a Crystal Report and BusinessObjects Analysis. All of which were executed in parallel in a BI Workspace creating a true test of HANA and the BOBJ tools.

The Demo 

This demo shows the HANA tables and the resulting BusinessObjects workspace with HANA and non-HANA sourced data. Pay particularly attention to the fact that the HANA system is in Germany, the BI system is in the USA and the user (me) is in a different location. And, we still see less than 12 seconds load time on all components (who said SAP is slow? J). Take a look of what now is possible in this short demo.

Next time we will look at other less known partitioning options for HANA Administrators and developers. Meanwhile, join me in Amsterdam next month for the BI 2013 conference where we take an in-depth look at HANA as well as some of the Dashbaord design options....

Thanks,

Dr. Berg