SAP HANA XSA

Native Development for SAP HANA

Francesco Alborghetti, Jonas Kohlbrenner, Abani Pattanayak, Dominik Schrank, Primo Sboarina

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781493216017
• eBook ISBN: 9781493216024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Want to create applications that run faster and perform better on SAP HANA? Learn how to design, test, and deploy native SAP HANA applications with SAP HANA XSA! Get started by exploring your development environment, tools, and the SAP HANA XSA architecture. Then define your data model with Core Data Services and HDB, add your application layer—Node.js, Java, or custom—and develop your presentation layer. Finish up by securing, troubleshooting, and deploying your app! Highlights include:
Developing native applications
Development environment
Development tools
SAP HANA XSA architecture
Data models
Application layer
Presentation layer
Security
Debugging
Sample code

Part I

Getting Started

1 Introduction to the SAP HANA Development Platform

With this first look, you’ll learn what it means to develop applications with the SAP HANA platform.

Initially released in November 2010, today SAP HANA is a strategic platform to develop and run applications. At its core, SAP HANA is a data management platform and an innovative in-memory database management system that was designed to manage large data volumes efficiently by optimally leveraging the underlying hardware architecture. The SAP HANA platform offers the ability to increase application performance and to enable new applications that weren’t possible before.

This chapter provides an introduction to the SAP HANA platform and what it means to develop native SAP HANA applications. We’ll first offer an overview of the business case of developing applications with SAP HANA. Next, we’ll discuss the components of the SAP HANA platform. Finally, we’ll highlight things to consider when designing a native SAP HANA application.

1.1 Business Cases for SAP HANA Applications

Efficiently managing an ever-growing amount of data and an increasing variety of devices, connections, types of data, applications, services, delivery methods, and business needs are just some of the challenges that businesses and organizations face. End users are looking for apps that help them make decisions in real time based on up-to-date data, which might be residing in distributed information systems. The SAP HANA platform implements a novel approach for managing large data volumes. It’s designed to process large data volumes in a very performant way by optimally leveraging the available hardware architecture. SAP HANA is a data management and application platform for all types of applications. In this section, we’ll highlight the strength of the SAP HANA platform and the business cases to leverage this technology.

SAP HANA is a multiprocessor platform based on a columnar, in-memory, and ACID-compliant (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) database that supports mission-critical applications by providing atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability capabilities:

• Atomicity
  This functionality refers to a system that can process a set of transactions entirely or not at all.
• Consistency
  This feature takes care that the data is consistent after processing a sequence of different options on the data.
• Isolation
  This functionality handles operations on data that are executed in parallel but aren’t impacting each other.
• Durability
  This capability takes care that the data is persisted after a transaction in a database system. That data that gets persisted also must be guaranteed in case of a system failure.

The SAP HANA in-memory database stores all data that must be retrieved quickly into the main memory, avoiding the expensive operations of swapping and data movements from the disk. The data is mainly saved into columnar tables, which are also referred to as column stores. Columnar tables are optimally suited for analytical applications because they are ideal for parallel processing and provide automatic data compression in SAP HANA.

The default data compression mechanism in the SAP HANA database occurs in column stores because the repeated values in the same column are stored only once and are represented by integer values, and the parallel processing is expedited because each column can be processed by a different processor. Additionally, the SAP HANA database offers advanced compression mechanisms that allow further compression of the data in columns using different compression functions. Advanced algorithms in SAP HANA can automatically determine the optimal compression methods for columns.

SAP HANA fully leverages the advantages of the technological advancements, which make vast amounts of main memory available at low prices, such as high-speed multicore processors, 64-bit operating systems, and robust cache memories to avoid unnecessary accesses to the memory. Different data storage options exist within the SAP HANA database to save the data in case of system failure and to store nonhot data.

Hot, Warm, and Cold Data

In SAP HANA, the data can be grouped conceptually into hot data (must be frequently obtained), warm data (doesn’t have to be accessed so frequently), and cold data (located very rarely and often stored just for legal reasons). The hot data is maintained on main memory in SAP HANA, the warm data is saved on disk, and the cold data can be stored outside of the SAP HANA platform in near-line storage solutions or archived.

With the SAP HANA database, it’s often no longer required to preaggregate data for analytical applications as the in-memory storage and available processing power enables end users to directly aggregate data on the fly. This innovation allows a simplification of the data model of applications and enables end users to analyze the data without needing to store the data first. This innovative processing capability ensures that SAP HANA can support both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) applications.

The SAP HANA platform can be deployed to both on-premise or in cloud environments. With the SAP HANA on-premise deployment option, a customer takes the responsibility for providing and managing the entire solution but has complete control over the system. In the SAP HANA cloud-based deployment, SAP or a hosting partner manages the SAP HANA system.

In addition to the traditional data types, the SAP HANA system is also capable of managing new data, such as spatial data and unstructured text. Furthermore, the SAP HANA system provides built-in extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities, which enables the procurement of data from a variety of data sources, such as remote sources (e.g., other databases), big data stores (e.g., Hadoop), remote Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and data streaming from sensors. Further functionalities of SAP HANA include but aren’t limited to text search, text mining, analysis of spatial data, management of networked information, predictive analytics, and analysis of time series data.

The SAP HANA platform allows developers to build full applications by providing application server capabilities. This application server can be leveraged to implement business logic, which offers optimal performance because it’s fully optimized for applications that integrate with the SAP HANA database. With the initial releases of SAP HANA, this applicatio...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Preface
• Part I   Getting Started
• 1   Introduction to the SAP HANA Development Platform
• 2   SAP HANA Development Environment
• 3   SAP HANA Development Tools
• 4   SAP HANA XS Advanced Architecture
• Part II   Developing an Application
• 5   Defining the Data Model
• 6   Developing the Application Layer
• 7   Developing a Presentation Layer
• Part III   Refining the Application
• 8   Securing Your Application
• 9   Troubleshooting Your Application
• 10   Deploying Your Application
• Appendices
• A   Migrating an SAP HANA XS Application to SAP HANA XS Advanced
• B   Additional Resources
• C   The Authors
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes