SAP HANA

SAP HANA is SAP's in-memory relational database, offered as SAP HANA Cloud and on premises, combining transactional and analytical processing in one engine with spatial, graph, document and predictive capabilities, and underpinning SAP S/4HANA.

Holding the working data in memory rather than on disk is the design decision the whole product follows from, and its consequence is architectural rather than merely fast. When analytical queries run acceptably against the transactional tables, the separate data warehouse and the nightly batch that populated it stop being necessary, which removes a whole layer of enterprise plumbing.

That is also the reason SAP rebuilt its business suite on it, and the reason the decision is rarely made on database merits. Most organisations adopt HANA because they are moving to S/4HANA, which makes it a consequence of an ERP decision rather than a database selection.

Multi-model support covering spatial, graph, document and predictive workloads in the same engine follows the same logic as the in-memory choice: keep the data in one place and avoid the copies. Rates are not published on the captured pages. Alongside the core engine, SAP HANA covers on-premises deployment, underpins SAP S/4HANA, data virtualisation across sources and high availability and disaster recovery, which is the practical surface a team works with day to day.