December 20, 2011

SQL Interface on Columns and Rows

Business operations have very diverse access patterns. They include read-mostly queries of analytical applications and write-intensive transactions of daily business. Further, all variants of data selects are present including point selects (e.g., details of a specific product) and range selects, retrieving sets of data (e.g., from a specified period like sales overview per region of a specific product for the last month).

Column and row-oriented storage in HANA provides the foundation to store data according to its frequent usage patterns in column or in row-oriented manner to achieve optimal performance. Through the usage of SQL, that supports column as well as row-oriented storage, the applications on top stay oblivious to the choice of storage layout.

Please also see our podcast on this technology concept.

December 19, 2011

Analytics on Historical Data

Analytics on historical data
All enterprise data has a lifespan: depending on the application, a datum might be expected to be changed or updated in the future in many cases, in few cases, or never. In financial accounting, for example, all data that is not from the current year plus all open items from the previous year can be considered 'historic data', since they may no longer be changed.

In HANA, historical data is instantly available for analytical processing from solid state disk (SSD) drives. Only active data is required to reside in-memory permanently.

Please also see our podcast on this technology concept.