Overview of Sap Hana: In-Memory Computing Technology and ITS Applications

Abstract — Traditional database management systems are designed for optimizing performance on hardware with constrained main memory. Disk I/O was the main bottleneck. The focus was on optimizing disk access, where by minimizing the number of disk pages to be read into main memory during processing. The SAP HANA database is designed from the ground up around the idea that memory is available in abundance. Instead of optimizing I/O hard disk access, SAP HANA optimizes memory access between the CPU cache and main memory. SAP HANA is a massively parallel (distributed) data management system that runs fully in main memory, allowing for row- and column based storage options, and supporting built-in multitenancy. Index Terms—High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA), Structured query language (SQL), multidimensional expression (MDX), Online transaction processing (OTLP), Online analytical processing (OLAP). I