What is SAP HANA DB

What do you understand by SAP HANA?

Ans. SAP HANA is an in-memory database that encompasses special software and hardware components used for a centralized ERP system and business application development.

It uses real-time data processing/computing engine which fetches data directly from the in-memory (main memory/RAM) speeding up the data retrieval operations.

Why is SAP HANA unique?

Ans. SAP HANA proves to be a unique tool for users in many ways. The reasons for uniqueness are:

• SAP HANA is the first technology ever to be used for both OLTP and OLAP application processing.
• It provides query processing environment for structured as well as unstructured data. That is, for both relational database (tables) and less structured (texts, graphs) respectively.
• The multi-core processing engines of the SAP HANA system process data parallelly. The parallel processing is done within different columns of the same database. Using a columnar database, the system optimizes data structure and eases storing large data by compressing it.