Getting into SAP HANA (part 1)

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…