SAP HANA Architecture overview:
The architecture overview of the In-Memory Computing Engine of SAP HANA. The SAP HANA database is developed in C++ and runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise 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.
1. Index Server contains the actual data and the engines for processing the data. It also coordinates and uses all the other servers.
2. Name Server holds information about the SAP HANA database topology. This is used in a distributed system with instances of HANA database on different hosts. The name server knows where the components are running and which data is located on which server.
3. Statistics Server collects information about Status, Performance and Resource Consumption from all the other server components. From the SAP HANA Studio we can access the Statistics Server to get status of various alert monitors.
4. Preprocessor Server is used for Analyzing Text Data and extracting the information on which the text search capabilities are based .
5. XS Engine is an optional component. Using XS Engine clients can connect to SAP HANA database to fetch data via HTTP.
Other databases marketed by SAP
SAP still offers other database products:.
- MaxDB
- Sybase IQ
- Sybase ASE
- SQL Anywhere
As a database agnostic company, SAP also resells databases from vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft to sit under their ERP Business Suite.
Competition Offering its own database solution to support its Business Suite ERP puts SAP in direct competition with some of its largest partners IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Among the more prominent competing products are:
- Appliances
- Microsoft Parallel Data warehouse (Microsoft)
- Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5600 (Teradata)
- Exadata Database Machine (Oracle)
- Exalytics In-Memory Machine (Oracle)
- Greenplum Data Computing Appliance (EMC)
- Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance (IBM)
- Vertica Analytics Platform (HP)
- In-memory database management systems
- Kognitio Analytical Platform (Kognitio)
- SolidDB (IBM)
- Times Ten (Oracle)
- Terracotta BigMemory (Software AG)
- Manifact (Manifact)
- MemSQL (MemSQL)
