De Nederlandse BI Podcast – Episode 7 XMAS edition

Ho ho ho, a special X-MAS edition of De Nederlandse BI Podcast today in which we look back at the 2013 BI tops and flops and look forward to 2014. Yes we are soooo original. Anyway, topics are SAP River, SAPUI5, OpenUI5, Webi 4.1, Lumira, KXEN, SAP InfiniteInsight, SAP Predictive Analysis and of course the usual Design Studio and HANA stuff!! Enjoy!

Check the show in iTunes, on our website or just use the Podcast player below.

The SAP Big Data Bus is coming to your town!

It’s now over 48 hours ago that we had the #AllAccessAnalytics webinar, and I’m still heavily fascinated by this Big Data Bus thing that was announced during the webinar. There are 60.000 SAP BI customers world-wide, and SAP is driving a bus (!!!) from town to town to showcase its lightning fast products. Oh man…

Over 30 minutes in this webinar and the new thing until now is a big fn data bus… pic.twitter.com/alKhI9jrgN

— Xavier Hacking (@xjhacking) August 14, 2013

Book review: SAP HANA – An Introduction

One of the most anticipated SAP books of 2012 is finally here: SAP HANA – An Introduction published by SAP Press (who else). I had the pleasure to see both authors Bjarne Berg and Penny Silvia at last year’s European BI2011 event in Amsterdam. Looking back at their sessions this should be a quality book so my expectations were high.

My last attempt at diving into the HANA stuff was in August and didn’t end that well. After successfully setting up  our Amazon/AWS HANA box and installing the tools I got stuck at SAP HANA Studio. So let’s see if this book will really show me how this thing works.

SAP HANA – An Introduction is divided into two parts: First the What, Why and When and second the How. The What, Why and When part, which takes about a third of the 400 book pages, is all about explaining things. What is in-memory computing, what is big data and how does the HANA solution look like. Here I got some answers to some basic questions that I still had on HANA. For example what would happen with the data in case of a power failure (since all of your data is loaded in-memory). Another thing nobody could explain to me was the concept of working with column-based storage of data versus row-based storage, which is illustrated very well in this book.

SAP HANA comes in two versions: A Standalone version and a version for SAP BW. The book not only covers the technical requirements and differences on both versions, but also the required skills you’ll need in your project team to implement HANA for each option. About 50 pages are dedicated to HANA use cases for both versions and provides guidelines on how to fit HANA into your business strategy.

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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…

Dilbert on Big Data (SAP HANA)

Todays Dilbert is a very funny comic about the Big Data (wiki) hype that has been going on for a while now. I’m watching all of this big data/HANA stuff a bit from the sidelines, though I did get all the SAP marketing promo and saw some impressive live demos of SAP HANA in combination with several of the BI4 front-end tools.

Unfortunately most of these demos only showed me how fast it was (“And now we loaded 100 million records in just a second…”) instead of solving an actual problem. At the Experience HANA site you can find a large number of ‘real’ use cases and ideas for big data. Check it!