Chapter 1. So, What Is This SAP HANA Thing Anyways?

If you have an interest in the computing field of databases, business intelligence, or in-memory technology, you'll have most probably come across the term SAP HANA several times over the last couple of years. Over the course of the next 300 pages or so, we'll be taking a journey together through the SAP HANA development landscape, looking at most of the functions that SAP HANA provides us developers, in order to provide our users with a new outlook on their data and their daily workload.

The book is split into four main sections:

• Chapters 1 and 2: Introduction and installation

• Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6: Database development in SAP HANA

• Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10: Ancillary functions useful to most developments

• Chapter 11: The XS Engine for website development

In this chapter we'll take a fairly high-level look at SAP HANA and the technology that underlies the system. We'll start with a couple of comparisons to more traditional database systems, and then examine each of the advances in technology that have made SAP HANA's performance possible.

But what really is SAP HANA? The simplest answer to this question is that SAP HANA is a relational database system, just like Oracle or SQL Server, or MySQL. That's it, really? Not very exciting, when you think about it.

Of course, if that was the whole answer, then this book would be very short, so what else is there to tell?

Let's start with a very simple example of what SAP HANA can do for its users.