Easy Service Marketplace

The SAP Service Marketplace web site is a monster of information overload, which seems to attest to the comprehensive amount of products and services available from SAP.  The Product menu option has options for SAP ERP, CRM, PLM, SCM, SRM and more.  SAP is known for its enterprise resource planning & customer relationship management, so you can probably figure out the first and second acronyms.   Googling PLM seems to suggest something about pathetic little monkeys.  SAP is a market leader in the supply-chain management segment.  But whose to say SCM doesn't stand for Synchronous Channel Mixer or Sweetened Condensed Milk? There are at least 379 possible meanings to the SCM acronym.

And don't get me started on Flash and popups.

more breadcrumbs than an Italian bakery... and all I wanted was to order a CD!

Here are some  acronyms from SAP, related to SAP and technology in general.  I used to work with a customer who maintained a database of thousands of internal acronyms just to help people navigate their own jobs.  Needless to say it was a large monopoly with thousands of employees, multiple purchasing systems, a web site with 100,000 pages, 47 unique customer identifiers, and 52 billing systems to bill them.  I'm not sure how many people found that acronym database but it was like finding the Rosetta Stone for me.

One of my first exposures to SAP was bringing data from R/2 and other systems into SQL Server to provide an ASP.NET consolidated reporting site for stationery and office supply purchases.  We found out for the customer that they could save over 1 million dollars a year just by ensuring their stationery cabinets were locked in August.  That year the school system in Canada was short 1 million dollars in stationery...

A site I discovered to help navigate the SAP landscape and their acronyms is Easy Service Marketplace.  It is a retro 90's-style no-frills version of the site with some useful links to some of the core marketplace offerings.  It seems mainly to focus on the legacy aspects of SAP (no HANA info here) but some of the shortcuts are true gems.

If you think popups are for spammers, and breadcrumbs are something found in a salad, this site might be a refreshing trip back to 1995 to get fast access to SAP resources.

Or there's always the Wayback Machine.  Ahhhh... Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung... 1996 was a good year for you...  The 1996 site map back then and today's map.

Intro to SAP Video

Dr. Bjarne Berg, co-author of SAP Hana: An Introduction provides an intro to SAP video.

HANA Training Video Step-by-Step: Tables, Views DataServices & BOBJ Explorer

Monday, September 16, 2013, 2:51 PM

Categories: Financials , Financials Reporting , IT , Performance , SCM , Project Management , CRM , CRM Reporting , BI-BW , Data Modeling , SAP BusinessObjects , BI BW Performance , BI BW Reporting , SAP BusinessObjects , SAP BusinessObjects Performance , Explorer , Project Management ,Financials , SCM , CRM

Some SAP Hana books on Amazon here.

SAP Hana Memory Utilization

SAP has an enormous amount of products, suites, acquisitions, and technologies.   SAP Hana seems to integrate with many of them as an underlying platform.   Its key selling feature is a drop-in replacement or complimentary side-by-side install with existing database solutions, with a migration.  Just tossing in SAP Hana doesn't provide the benefits that actually optimizing the application for Hana would, and could actually be like throwing a Ferarri in the water like a boat anchor, instead of stripping out the engine and dropping it in the boat.

Since SAP Hana is an in-memory database, and it uses gobs of memory, you should probably have some knowledge of how memory is allocated. More info on memory configuration in the Cookbook.  If you're using Windows, Sysinternals RAMMAP is an invaluable resource for seeing what's going on with your memory.  A primer for memory in Linux is here.  AWS has some Cloudwatch scripts to monitor memory and disk usage.

If you miscalculate the RAM utilization, it sounds like out of memory errors could cause the platform to crash.  In the case of Amazon AWS for Hana, the suggestion to fix here is "did you turn it off and on?" or add on some expensive solid state hardware.

Another tip with memory usage is that row tables need to fit completely into memory, while column tables can cache only their indexes or indexes + part of the tables for performance.  Row tables could cause problems if you decide to use Hana like a legacy database rather than a columnstore one.  Hana is an OLTAP database (Online Transactional & Analytical Processing).

Row vs. Column data source information here.

Microstrategy Achieves First BI Certification on Hana

Microstrategy achieves BI Certification on Hana.  

Microstrategy is ahead of the game and integrates fully with Hana now.

SAP Hana Certification Pathways

Like most database or application suites, there are multiple paths for certification revolving around:

1. Installing, configuring, securing and maintaining.
2. Developing, modeling, optimizing, testing.

Further info on the 2 paths to Hana Certification is here.

SAP Hana - Get Started

I am a consultant pursuing knowledge (and perhaps certifications) in SAP products and technologies, among other things. 

This blog will track my progress along with some links to help others..

Right now the hottest SAP certification is for SAP Hana.  The biggest problems in many enterprise organizations relate to mass amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data, and slow and dysfunctional processes to manage said data.  As the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) grows, so the performance degrades.  Hana fills the niche of being a database server able to supply both a transactional store for SAP or custom applications, and a warehousing system for reporting and analytics.  It also gives developers blazing-fast access to text analytics, predictive analysis and cube technologies.

Not to mention that it speeds up SAP BW performance.  2,000 customers seem to be interested in the technology which is still in its infancy at SP6 (v2.0 or at least close to it).  The NBA uses it for crunching stats on its web site.   Google Glass & Android will leverage Hana for realtime tracking of per-second life events.

Hana is offered as an appliance, a cloud PAAS, a standalone software install, and various other offerings that complement SAP software.

Hana installations can run from $0.99/hr up to the millions of dollars.  Start by looking at the offerings for SME's here.

Being in-memory rather than on-disk has its advantages and disadvantages.  Some links to get started.

Where to Start getting Certified with SAP Hana
SAP Hana Marketplace
PHP Rocks with SAP Hana
Howto Get and Install License
Howto Fix Secure Storage
SAP Hana Deployment Shell (With 14-day Hana Access)
SAP Hana Cloud Development
ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) with Hana
SAP LT for realtime or near-realtime replication
SAP Hana Developer Center with lots of videos and training material
SAP Extended App Services (XS Engine)
Implementation Use Cases
Text Analytics
Top 10 Myths

As a SQL geek who spends a lot of time tuning query plans, Hana sounds like it could present some serious opportunities for those app developers that decide to throw the kitchen sink at it without understanding you should focus on the plumbing first.