SAP HANA Vora – Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked QuestionsSAP HANA Vora

SAP HANA Vora™: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise

SAP HANA Vora™ software enables digital businesses to innovate and compete through in-the-moment contextual awareness. It lets you use familiar online analytical processing (OLAP) and programming languages to quickly analyze all available data in enterprise and Hadoop systems in a coherent way, bridging the divide between enterprise data and the onslaught of Big Data generated by today’s digital economy.

2 General Information About SAP HANA Vora

3 Product Details: How It Works and Compares to Other Offerings

5 Business Benefits for Companies and Industries

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SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise

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© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT SAP HANA VORA

What is SAP HANA Vora?

SAP HANA Vora is an in-memory query engine that plugs into the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on Hadoop.

What are the challenges that companies face in the digital economy?

The digital economy generates massive amounts of data from virtually endless sources – social networks, mobile apps, the Internet of Things, and the like. Companies that want to tap into Big Data have experimented with Hadoop as a way to reduce storage costs. However, processing and analyz-ing data in Hadoop, especially within the context of existing enterprise applications and analytics, have proved challenging for several reasons:

Inefficient data processing: Current batch-mode tools used to process data in Hadoop are not well suited to the fast, drill-down nature of today’s business questions.

Lack of business alignment: Data lakes and enterprise systems often exist as separate entities, resulting in discrepancies. Unstructured raw data in Hadoop lacks the necessary semantics for enriching enterprise data to support context-aware decision making and discoveries in a unified way.

High cost of managing Big Data: While Hadoop can store and access vast amounts of detailed data at lower costs, it results in multiple data plat-forms across the enterprise, creating complexity and potential new risks for IT.

How does SAP HANA Vora address these challenges?

SAP HANA Vora enables OLAP analysis of Hadoop data through data hier-archy enhancements in Spark SQL and compiled queries for accelerated processing. SAP HANA Vora helps make decisions more precise through interactive and drill-down analysis across corporate and Hadoop data. Data scientists and developers can now readily enrich their dataset in Hadoop with corporate data in the SAP HANA® database. It also reduces complexity and cost by simplifying data access and processing across SAP HANA and Hadoop.


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SAP HANA Vora offers three licensing options to support different requirements:

SAP HANA Vora™, developer edition

SAP HANA Vora SAP HANA Vora, enterprise edition

FreeAvailable in the cloud (SAP HANA® Cloud Platform; Amazon Web Services – infrastructure fees apply)

Subscription-based pricing, 24-month term licenseOn premise and cloud – price based on number of nodes per year

Subscription-based pricing, 24-month term licenseOn premise and cloud – price based on number of nodes per year

Community support only

SAP support SAP support

Cannot be deployed in production

Full use Full use, including access rights to SAP data in Hadoop via SAP HANA Vora without licensing SAP named users

PRODUCT DETAILS: HOW IT WORKS AND COMPARES TO OTHER OFFERINGS

What are the key features of SAP HANA Vora?

SAP HANA Vora includes a unique set of features and capabilities: • An in-memory query engine that runs on Apache Spark execution framework

• Compiled queries for accelerated processing across Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) nodes

• Enhanced Spark SQL semantic to include hierarchies to enable OLAP and drill-down analysis

• Enhanced mashup application programming interface (API) for easier access to enterprise application data for machine learning workloads

• Support for all Hadoop distributions • An open development interface


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What are the major differences in Apache Spark, SAP HANA Vora, and the SAP HANA platform?

Products Apache Spark SAP HANA Vora™

SAP HANA® platform

Description An open-source, in-memory data processing frame-work for Hadoop

In-memory query engine that plugs into Spark execution framework

In-memory data and application platform; fully atomicity, consis-tency, isolation, durability (ACID) compliant to support mission- critical deployment requirements for data centers and cloud

Key capabilities

For Hadoop • Unified framework for building data pipelines

• Streaming, interactive SQL queries, graph computation, and machine learning

For enterprise apps/analytics with Hadoop

• Enriched interac-tive query analy-sis of Hadoop data with data hierarchies and time-dependent hierarchies

• Enhanced mashup API for easier access of enterprise app data in machine learning workloads

• Compiled queries for accelerated queries across nodes

For enterprise apps/analyticsCore development and deployment platform for:

• New generation of applications such as hybrid transaction- analytic applications

• Real-time analyt-ics embedded within applica-tions or across enterprise analytic land-scapes (data mart + data warehousing + data lakes)

• Acceleration of existing applica-tion or business intelligence workloads


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What is the relationship between SAP HANA Vora and SAP HANA platform?

SAP HANA Vora is designed to work synergistically with the SAP HANA platform to provide end-to-end in-memory computing across enterprise data in SAP HANA and Hadoop systems. Both the SAP HANA platform and SAP HANA Vora are also independent products and can be used sepa-rately to support different use cases. The SAP HANA platform does not require SAP HANA Vora to run, or vice versa.

What is the relationship between SAP HANA Vora and Apache Hadoop and Spark?

SAP HANA Vora provides enriched features for the Spark execution frame-work, such as data hierarchies that enable drill-down processing of raw data. SAP HANA Vora will also provide features such as time-dependent hierarchies, unit-of-measure conversion, and currency conversion to make data easier to use in business settings. For more detail on the differences between SAP HANA Vora and Apache Spark, please see the comparison table above.

How do I use SAP HANA Vora if I already have Apache Hadoop and Spark installed?

You can deploy SAP HANA Vora on an existing Hadoop installation as long as that installation meets the prerequisites stated in the installation manual for SAP HANA Vora.

BUSINESS BENEFITS FOR COMPANIES AND INDUSTRIES

Who will benefit by using SAP HANA Vora?

SAP HANA Vora will deliver the most value to people in the following positions:

Business analysts can perform root cause analysis using interactive queries across both business and Hadoop data to better understand business context.

Data scientists can discover patterns by trying new modeling techniques with a combination of business and Hadoop data, all without duplicating data copies within data lakes.

Software developers can deploy a query engine within applications that can span enterprise and Hadoop systems using familiar programming tools.


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What are the main benefits of using SAP HANA Vora?

SAP HANA Vora enables precision decision making through interactive and drill-down analysis across corporate and Hadoop data. It democra-tizes access for data scientists and developers who can now easily enrich their raw dataset in Hadoop with corporate data in SAP HANA. And unify-ing SAP HANA and Hadoop in the landscape simplifies ownership of Big Data for the IT department.

How can different industries use SAP HANA Vora to solve key challenges?

Financial services • Fraud detection – Detect anomalies and rogue trades by analyzing historical trends and current data simultaneously.

• Risk mitigation – Perform Monte Carlo simulations to produce distribu-tions of possible outcome values with more precise context.

• 360-degree customer marketing – Combine customer data with unstructured data from social media, e-mail, Web site activity, and discussion forums to better target sales and marketing.

Utilities • Predictive maintenance – Optimize maintenance of transformers and low tension devices through more complete historical information.

• Virtual power plants – Forecast consumption and production based on weather, load profiles, and so forth with better context.

• Analytics – Perform powerful analytics for infrastructure optimization, energy theft detection, load balancing, and more.

• Archiving – Keep archived smart meter, billing, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), and customer relationship management data at the ready but a lower cost.

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How can different industries use SAP HANA Vora to solve key challenges?

Telecommunications • Network capacity planning – Analyze call detail records (CDRs) and network load to plan infrastructure expansion with greater precision.

• Real-time bandwidth allocation – Steer traffic and optimize network quality of service (QoS) in real time to maintain the best service quality.

• Cell phone service improvement – Analyze and improve instances of poor cellular service, such as dropped calls or poor audio, by adding in relevant data.

• Targeted network maintenance and upgrades – Analyze the impact of cable network congestion on churn, and identify which network upgrades will produce greater incremental revenue.

Healthcare • 360-degree patient view – Converge test, genomic, archive, patient care, and patient history from many sources into a unified view.

• Insurance and Medicare fraud analysis – Analyze vast bodies of collected claims material to uncover fraud.

• Confirm diagnosis with collected literature – Bring together patient data with up-to-date journal and medical literature data in real time to improve diagnoses and treatment plans.

• Improve research – Analyze more data from more studies in a converged environment for statistical clues to patient outcomes

Find Out More

To find out more about SAP HANA Vora, visit us online at www.sap.com/hana-vora.

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SAP HANA Vora – Frequently Asked Questions