SAP HANA for Sybase DBAs

Transform yourself to the better career keeping your core alive..

Sybase ASE, which stands for Adaptive Server Enterprise, was Sybase’s enterprise-class database for transactional applications which brought revolutionary with its Architecture of 1 Server multiple databases, ease of access and Robust database management with optimal performance at minimal TOC. Sybase ASE became widely popular in the finance industy, but was only able to run SAP applications with the ASE verison 15.7 released in Sep' 2011. In April' 2014, SAP released ASE 16 (dropping Sybase Name) and SAP is planning for ASE to be the preferred database for running transactional applications in SAP’s Real-Time Data Platform, a collection of data management tools that SAP is integrating to provide very fast performance.

SAP (Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing) brought revolution of data management with HANA (The SAP HANA® platform can increase analysis speed by more than 10,000x) which is capable to handle columnar data or COLUMN-STORE (Sybase ASIQ is pioneer, which SAP IQ software holds the Guinness World Record for loading, storing, and analyzing Big Data at 34.4 terabytes per hour) and ROW-STORE data (Sybase ASE is one of the top RDBMSs). It also encapsulates the InMemoryDatabases (SAP HANA is an in-memory database, is a combination of hardware and software made to process massive real time data using In-Memory computing)  and PhysicalDatabases dynamically to handle the data effectively. While SAP HANA can support transaction and analytic processing on the same data, not every business application stands to benefit greatly enough from up-to-the-moment analysis and ad-hoc queries to justify the expense of running it on HANA. SAP plans for ASE to be a less-expensive alternative to HANA for such cases. At the same time, SAP plans to make data in ASE easily accessible to HANA and vice versa, easing integration for companies with a mixed landscape.

SAP is including a license for Sybase ASE with SAP ERP on HANA, indicating that SAP has plans for these two databases to work together. SAP is also planning to make ASE a transitional database between a standard disk-based database and SAP HANA. SAP is working toward making migration from ASE to HANA very smooth using the Sybase Replication Server. For those planning to use HANA as a database in the future, SAP recommends moving to ASE in the short term to make for an easy transition to HANA in the long term.

SAP HANA Architecture

The SAP HANA database is developed in C++ and runs on SUSE Linux Enterpise Server. SAP HANA database consists of multiple servers and the most important component is the Index Server. SAP HANA database consists of Index Server, Name Server, Statistics Server, Preprocessor Server and XS Engine. I'm providing herewith very high-level info, so as to make yourself comfortable and get ready to reach new level with SAP-HANA. Start exploring and learning the future's Database..

Index Server: (like the DATA SERVER in ASE)

• Index server is the main SAP HANA database component
• It contains the actual data stores and the engines for processing the data.
• The index server processes incoming SQL or MDX statements in the context of  authenticated sessions and transactions.

Persistence Layer: 

The database persistence layer is responsible for durability and atomicity of transactions. It ensures that the database can be restored to the most recent committed state after a restart and that transactions are either completely executed or completely undone. 

Preprocessor Server: 

The index server uses the preprocessor server for analyzing text data and extracting the information on which the text search capabilities are based. 

Name Server: 

The name server owns the information about the topology of SAP HANA system. In a distributed system, the name server knows where the components are running and which data is located on which server. 

Statistic Server: 

The statistics server collects information about status, performance and resource consumption from the other servers in the system.. The statistics server also provides a history of measurement data for further analysis. 

Session and Transaction Manager: 

The Transaction manager coordinates database transactions, and keeps track of running and closed transactions. When a transaction is committed or rolled back, the transaction manager informs the involved storage engines about this event so they can execute necessary actions. 

XS Engine: 

XS Engine is an optional component. Using XS Engine clients can connect to SAP HANA database to fetch data via HTTP. 

Source : SAP website and various SAP GURUs (Thanks much to ALL)