Software Development on the SAP HANA Platform: Written by a SAP HANA expert, this book takes you from installation to running your own processes in no time. By the end of the course you'll have awesome data retrieval and analytical powers to call on.

If you want to do any development work on SAP HANA, the first thing you need is access to a server.

There are currently three ways to access a SAP HANA machine. They have been listed in decreasing order of price:

Each of these options will give you access to SAP HANA, in slightly different ways.

Purchasing a SAP HANA license and appliance

This is obviously the most expensive option, and only really feasible if you are an end user client of SAP who wishes to use SAP HANA as the database for enterprise applications.

The purchase of a SAP HANA license gives access to the SAP In-Memory download section on the SAP Software Download Center (SWDC) website, as shown in the following screenshot:

In order to access the SWDC website, you'll need a SAP Service Marketplace...

Now that you have the SAP HANA Studio software downloaded, you can install it on your PC. The installation itself is very simple, but there are a couple of prerequisites:

Once you have satisfied the prerequisites, you can run the installer. Just...

When you run the Studio for the first time, you are presented with a welcome screen presenting the main functions of the program, as shown here:

There are seven options on this screen (until release 38 of the Studio, only the first four were present):

Now that we've taken a look at the different panels available in the Studio, we can connect to our SAP HANA server.

In order to create a connection to your SAP HANA server, you can proceed in one of the following two ways:

The first thing we need to do in order to begin developing data models in SAP HANA is to import some sample tables and data. Some data has been prepared for this book, which will enable us to use all the features of the SAP HANA Studio and develop a reporting application. You don't have to use the sample data if you don't want to; you can follow the examples in the book using your own data if you prefer. However, if you use the data that's been prepared, you'll be able to see the example application unfold, using the different functionalities that SAP HANA provides.

This sample data will allow us to build a large range of data models, and will show the different features available...

Now that the data for the examples in the book is in our SAP HANA system, we can take a few minutes to examine it and get familiar with it.

Here is a visual representation of the sample data:

The Studio offers a very useful Data Preview tool, which can be used to see the contents of tables (and indeed any modeling view we create later). To access this function, just right-click on the table (or view) name, and select Data Preview. The following is a screenshot showing the contents of the CUSTOMER table we just imported, so that you can compare it with the data in your SAP HANA system:

The Data Preview function does what its name suggests, it shows you the raw data in the underlying table. There are other possibilities offered by this tool, which we will see in detail later.

You might like to take a few minutes to have a look at the data in each of the tables we imported, and compare what you see to the schema of the links between the tables on the previous page. When...

In this chapter, we have taken a look at the different options available to access a SAP HANA instance, from purchasing a license and a machine (very expensive) and accessing an instance on the cloud (relatively expensive), to a trial account offered by SAP (free).

Next, we installed the SAP HANA Studio, the administration and modeling tool used to interact with the SAP HANA server. We looked at the different functions offered by the software, and the parts of the user interface.

Finally, we imported some sample data into our SAP HANA instance. This data will be used throughout the book as a reference for the models we create, and using the Data Preview function in the Studio, we took a first look at the data itself.

In the next chapter, we'll be building our first data model in SAP HANA, an attribute view. This will allow us to gather data from several tables together in one place, creating one virtual table we can then re-use in other developments.