Monday 20 July 2015

SAP HANA: Achieving Set operations using Joins

Now we can have multiple discussions. As we know that achieving with UNION is better than JOINS. But again it depends on the volumes of the data and the place at which you are applying it.

As per our experiences, we also know that if we can achieve with the help of Attribute /Analytic Views it is better than doing the same with Calculation View Graphical / SQL. In this document i have tried to achieve with Attribute views as much as possible and while doing this i came to know about the Full Outer Join option through graphical models is not possible anymore.

These are 7 questions on which Jody has discussed,

Here are our Tables:
Table 1:

SAP HANA Join, SAP HANA

Table 2: 

SAP HANA Joins

Monday 6 July 2015

A Guide to Integrate GRC with SAP HANA

1. PURPOSE

The purpose of this document is to define clear steps required to implement GRC on HANA plug in to integrate GRC 10.1 with HANALIVE DB for user provisioning.

2. SCOPE

This scope applies for Basis team who support SAP GRC on HANA configuration after will go live. This procedure applied for pre requisites, installation and post installation configuration of complete SAP GRC HANA “plug in” setup.
This document does not cover security setup that required for User provisioning on HANALIVE through SAP GRC system

3. Component details

Need at least GRC 10.1 with SAP NW 7.4 system to integrate this with HANA
SAP GRC ACCESS CONTROL  11  sap.com SAP ACCESS CONTROL 10.1
SAP NETWEAVER  7.4 sap.com SAP NET WEAVER 7.4
HANACLIENT SPS 8 Rev 82 Patch level 0
HANALIVE DB SPS8 Rev 82 Patch level 0
HCO_GRC_PI SP06 Patch level 0 (GRC Plugin)

Friday 3 July 2015

The Science and Art Behind HANA Performance Modeling

SAP HANA Art, SAP HANA Performance Modeling

During the course of last 2 years, I’ve conducted SAP HANA performance workshops and reviewed information models at various customers. I encounter similar modeling issues or mistakes almost at all customer projects. The good news is that most of the performance problems can be resolved by making with minor changes to the model.

However it is critical to understand the reasons behind the performance problems consistently observed in the HANA implementations. Here are my observations.

  1. HANA modelers have pretty good idea on how to build attribute views, analytic views, and calculation views which are part of HANA modeling. However, there is significant gap in the knowledge of using these HANA information views effectively to address the business requirements.
  2. Some of the HANA modelers do not have data warehousing background and hence lack the knowledge of basic multi-dimensional analytical reporting, which leads to poor solution design.
  3. Modelers and developers seems to have the knowledge of “what works and what does not work”, but they seem to lack the knowledge “Why it is behaving the way it is behaving”, hence the struggle to apply the knowledge effectively while building the models.
  4. Finally there is a fundamental flaw in the understanding of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Is performance testing a phase before Go-Live or is it part of unit testing? HANA’s query response is extremely fast for the smaller data set regardless of the modeling approach. This gives a false positive of efficient modeling. The realization of performance issues become visible only in Staging/QA system where models are tested against large data volumes.