SAP touts HANA for transactional and analytic systems

SAP has shed more light on its plans for its in-memory computing database HANA and has showcased the technology's ability to handle large qualtities of transactional data.

The details were released during a keynote at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando given by SAP founder and chairman, Hasso Plattner.

Plattner demonstrated SAP's ability to run its Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for SMBs on the HANA database in front of attendees and promised customers it would be available "soon". He added that the ERP system was more than a hundred times faster in its analytics capabilities when running on HANA.

This was the first time SAP has publicly demonstrated an ERP suite running on HANA. Plattner used the occasion to promote the product as a transactional database, as well as the analytical one it has always sold as.

"HANA is designed for both transactional processing and analytics, so why don't you run your transactions on it now," he said.

Plattner also had some barbed comments for rivals, criticising those that continue to offer customers a choice between online transaction processing and analytical databases.

"You have to have a transactional and analytical system at the same time, especially for future generations," he said.

Plattner said SAP was still currently working on making its Business Suite - the ERP suite offered to larger businesses - ready for HANA.

"We will work feverishly on the suite to get it HANA-ready," said Plattner.

"There is probably functionality SAP should drop from the suite to get it HANA-ready, but we will have to have a detailed conversation with as many of you as possible."

Plattner said the next step for customers who choose to run their ERP systems on HANA is for them to add their Business Warehouse solutions to the mix.

"We can move this technology together. It's a company decision but we can run them in one system," he said.

"We have revamped BW [SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse] on HANA. We now push everything from the [online analytic processing] system in BW to the OLAP system in HANA. This version with BW in HANA is as fast as BW is [when it's converged with] BW accelerator."

HANA's ability to scale was also showcased at the event, with a demo of HANA software running on IBM hardware. The example is the largest HANA system in action and scales to 100 nodes, 4,000 computing cores and 100TB in DRAM.