Preface

Real-time analytics is revolutionizing the way we interact with customers, partners and system in totality. The continuous evolution of technology is changing the way we do business. Uncertainty and change in the global marketplace is driving new ideas and innovation. Competing in this new hyper-connected and digitized world requires a new business platform that meets the demand for speed and innovation with reduced complexity. The demand for real-time data and analytics is so pervasive that every customer, big or small, wants to have it.

Real-time analytics is basically the use of (or to have an option to use) all the available data and resources within the enterprise as and when they are needed. The term real-time analytics implies practically instant access and use of analytical data.

As it turns out, to answer this need and the changes in the business, SAP came up with a complete out-of-the-box solution, transforming the database industry by combining database, data processing, and application platform capabilities into a single in-memory platform called SAP HANA. SAP HANA makes it possible for applications and analytics to run without information processing latency. It also allows to build sense and response solutions on a large volume of real-time data without thinking of pre-aggregates.

To answer why you should choose SAP HANA for real-time analytics, we would have a look at the key capabilities of SAP HANA, such as Massive speed—the scan speed of the SAP HANA database is 3.19 billion symbol per second per core (in lab conditions). High efficiencies—if you port the data from a classical database to SAP HANA, eliminating unnecessary indexes and aggregate tables and allowing operational reporting directly on SAP HANA, the data footprint could be reduced by a factor of as high as 37. The data compression rate is approximately 4 to 1. Lower cost providing a dual OLTP—the OLAP architecture reduces the data footprint, which saves on storage costs.

Eliminating the need for data extraction and transfer from OLAP to OLTP saves time and resources. Flexibility—SAP HANA is an ideal big data analytics platform, capable of efficiently loading and rapidly analyzing multiple data types in both structured and unstructured forms.

While there are many tools in the market for real-time analytics, this book discusses how we can use all the preceding mentioned features of SAP HANA and design our data models for real-time analytics. We will be working on SAP HANA as a sidecar / standalone scenario to create our data models. This book is organized into four parts, discussing various concepts related to data modeling.

This book has a particular structure, as follows: