SAP HANA Studio for Mac

Who would have thought. A full featured native Mac version of a SAP development tool. Well, it’s here now. Check this page for the download of SAP HANA Studio Developer Edition (version 1.00.56) for Mac OS X.

Please please please let this be the first of a whole range of MacSAP apps! Having to fire up Parallels every time I want to use SAP GUI or one of the BusinessObjects tools is soooo annoying. SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio would be a nice candidate to be ported next.

New download, exclusively on #sap #devcenter: HANA Studio for Mac OS-X – get it from https://t.co/RxqEtHarDI

— Juergen Schmerder (@schmerdy) June 27, 2013

Getting into SAP HANA (part 3): SAP HANA Starter book

Last year I got a bit stuck when playing around with the SAP HANA Studio on our Amazon AWS HANA setup. In the meanwhile a great book (SAP HANA: An Introduction) has been published providing all the ins-and-outs of HANA. This book is on the #1 best-seller spot at SAP Press for months now!

Time to get some actual hands-on experience with those Analtyic views and Calculated attributes. I found this book called SAP HANA Starter by Mark Walker, which appeared to be an extremely practical guide to get you started with HANA and let you learn the basics of the SAP HANA Studio tool.

The book starts with a basic intro to HANA, including some explanation on the column-based database. This is all very very short, but that’s okay because the purpose of this book is to give some practical guidance, not all the theory. Next the book takes you through the installation, the setup of SAP HANA Studio itself and finally a big example scenario is followed. This is all done in a step-by-step manner, supported with a lot of screenshots.

What I really like about the demo scenario that is worked out throughout the book is that you don’t have to set up things like a connected source database or an additional tool like Data Services or so to get started. The book show you how to create some new tables and how to use some SQL statements to create some demo data yourself. Based on these tables a scenario is followed in which objects like the analytic view, attribute view, filters, calculated attribute, graphical calculation view and so on are discussed and created step-by-step. If you follow all the steps, in the end the result of your ‘HANA application’  can be presented through MS Excel.

SAP HANA Starter is a very to the point and hands-on ebook and will be useful for you if you are a SAP HANA Studio first timer. The book has about 50 pages of content which will keep you busy for a sunday afternoon. The ebook is priced around $9,-, which is just good value.

SAP HANA Starter by Mark Walker, ISBN 9781849688680.

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…