This fall I worked with the University of Wisconsin and loaded 1.22 billion rows to their HANA system and put BO Explorer as the analytical tool. In this demo we are looking at the unbelievable speed we saw.
Demo Background
The sales data was loaded to SAP HANA using the standard BusinessObjects DataServices ETL tool. Since the data was located near the server, we were able to load and compress 407 million rows per hour into a column based table. We also had tables for customers, products, stores, country, and sales organization.
To account for slower network speeds, the demo was recorded via Wi-Fi connection between Milwaukee and North Carolina, while the hardware was a node of the IBM x3950 system with 256 GB memory (expandable to over 1TB per node) located at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee (thanks to Ross Hightower for letting me borrow his system). As some of the readers may know, I teach SAP HANA at the University Alliance.
The Demo
The Data Model
The data model was a simple HANA Attribute view of customers linking the customer, country and sales organization tables. Another HANA attribute view was also created for Products data. Finally, a HANA Analytical view was created for linking both the attribute views with the 1.22 billion rows in our sales table
We also added a calculation in the analytical view for ‘net revenue’ and a filter for only customers after 2007. So, there was lots of stuff going on inside HANA in addition to simply reading data.
Summary
As you saw in this demo, SAP HANA provides amazing speeds with less than two seconds when filtering more than one billion records down to 90 million records and summarizing the data by country, products, stores, customers and currencies (at the same time).
This is why SAP HANA is the ‘must-have’ application for 2014 for those with ambitions to develop true Business Intelligence, or BI self-service in their organization. It is also a key tool for those with plans for dashboards and real user acceptance in their business community.
Next year, I will be speaking and delivering the Jumpstart session at the HANA conference in March in Orlando and at the BI 2014 conference. I hope to see you there...
Thanks,
Dr. Berg