Getting into SAP HANA (part 1)

Posted by Xavier Hacking

According to the number of tweets in my TL the SAP HANA hype is getting bigger and bigger each day, so I guess it is time to step in. But, where to begin? I’ve been watching this whole development over the past year from a far distance so I know a bit about the purpose and possibilities of HANA, but I don’t have the complete overview and I also lack the hands-on experience with the HANA tools.

Last week I got the SAP HANA Studio software from the SCN site. Installation on Windows 7 went without any problems. At Interdobs we rent a HANA box on Amazon Web Services (in the cloud) and I managed to launch it and connect to it with SAP HANA Studio. With AWS you only have to pay for what you use, so this is obviously a cheaper way to start with HANA than buying a 80k box which you also have to maintain yourself.

So, having everything set up and ready to go, my journey ended a few minutes later. The HANA box was obviously very very empty (besides some technical tables) and I had no idea what to do with it; how to build tables and load some data.

Time to take a few steps back. Sven van Leuken posted a link on his blog about a ‘free SAP HANA certification’. This is a nice start! Not only is this a test to check your HANA knowledge, it also provides an introductory/overview course for HANA.

This 80 minutes online course covers the following subjects (login required):

  • SAP HANA Solution Overview for Solution Consultants
  • SAP HANA Technical Overview
  • SAP HANA Overview of Data Provisioning
  • SAP HANA Overview of Data Replication
  • SAP HANA Overview of Information Models
  • SAP HANA Data Analysis and Reporting

After the course you can take a test and if you pass (yeah you will pass, it is easy if you pay some attention) you’ll get some kind of certification that you now are a Level 1 SAP HANA Solution consultant, whatever this means.

Anyway, after watching this course I had a far better understanding of the HANA landscape, its building blocks and possibilities. But, it remained quite high-level and didn’t cover the actual usage of the SAP HANA Studio tooling. Let’s look into that another time!

To be continued…

HackingSAP.com - Aug 12, 2012 | Knowledge sharing, New technology, SAP
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2 comments

  1. Fernando Bártolo (@flakz0r)
    August 12, 2012

    I installed it on a VM and have been playing with HANA for a couple of months. Loaded some CSVs with 20M records just to test the performance and was amazed by it.

    Recently i prepared a VM with BW on HANA but haven’t had the time to load data into optimized Infocubes yet.

    Reply
    • Jonny
      March 30, 2015

      Hi,

      would you sell the vmware image for bw on hana. I need it for training.

      Thanks,

      Reply

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