Understanding the SAP HANA architecture

Enterprise application requirements have become more demanding—complex reports with high computation on huge volumes of transaction data and also business data of other formats (both structured and semi-structured). Data is being written or updated, and also read from the database in parallel. Thus, integration of both transactional and analytical data into single database is required. SAP HANA has evolved from here. Columnar storage exploits modern hardware and technology (multiple CPU cores, large main memory, and caches) to achieve the requirements of enterprise applications. Apart from this, it should also support procedural logic where certain tasks cannot be completed with simple SQL.

The SAP HANA database consists of several services (servers). The index server is the most important component of all the servers. Other servers are name server, preprocessor server, statistics server, and XS Engine:

• Index server: This server holds the actual...