SAP flashes cash to pump up HANA biz SAP hasn't had a product as popular as its HANA in-memory data processing engine since the R/3 enterprise resource planning suite launched two decades ago and took off like wildfire, transforming the German software company into the dominant application software provider in the world. SAP wants to hit replay with HANA, and it is …
Possibly cheaper to emove the cruft and tune the code and queries before you rip out your infrastructure and buy new tin.
Still, its impressive to say they are funding consultants to do this work for free - that sounds like an awful lot of cash assuming they do the whole job. I wonder how they recoup that.....every year....
I don't see the 18 month warranty being that popular though - offering a move from a mature Oracle or DB2 database, to HANA, and then off to Sybase or whatever SAP have got on a shelf in the back room. Where are my organisation's skills in that 3rd backend database going to come from.
".....they are funding consultants to do this work for free .... I wonder how they recoup that...." Agreed, very interesting. But then I have never heard of a SAP implementation that didn't come with shedloads of consulting, using from a SAP partner/reseller, so I guess this it will actually be an accredited partner that delivers the service "for free" as part of the overall charged consulting work and then claims it back from SAP. All the hardware vendors run similar programs where the resellers can sell a piece of hardware with an installation/implementation service, using the vendor's part number at a lower price than the actual service costs, delivers the service and then claims the costs back from the vendor. I guess SAP sees this as a way as increasing its appeal with both the customers and the reseller base. Not a bad strategy, especially seeing as Oracle seems to be going out of its way to upset their own channel partners.
MaxDb comes from Adabas, which SAP bought the rights to the code years ago (was known as SAPDB for a while). This was then handed over to MySQL and was going to be the MySQL enterprise addition. However oracle came on board at Sun so SAP grabbed the IP back again (Mysql was going to be certified for SAP at time).
MaxDB has been used for a while as an in Memory database with the SAP supply chain management suite it was known as live cache.
Interesting to hear of the Adabas connection, since Omex (Ellison's job before starting Oracle) used Adabas, according to a friend who worked there at the time. IIRC, their document-storage system stored images on a Write-once optical unit, with indexing in Adabas on a PDP-11. So, how few people were actually involved in the birth of the database?
While HANA may work well for column store DWs with some nice table aggregation and indexing features, much like Netezza, I doubt this is going to replace traditional RDBMS anytime in the next several years. There are a bunch of functionality issues, but the primary technical issue is: What happens if your HANA server blows a gasket and goes down (or you have a memory error)? As all of that data is stored in main-memory, you would lose the whole database. You could have a back-up server, but it would take some time to get that online even if they are synchronously connected. If they get DRAM to work with some persistent state, then we could be talking. Plus, except for the top 1% of workloads, no one is saying they need millisecond I/O response from the DB. It is kind of a niche market, at least until the component cost comes down.
".....What happens if your HANA server blows a gasket...." HANA is designed to be clustered, in fact there's even an IBM clustered solution for it (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/solutions/sap/hana/index.html).
Can we have some new IBM trolls, please, the current crop are severely sub-standard? Where's Jesper gone?
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