SAP high performance analytics and database strategy

SAP's goal is to become the No. 2 Database company by 2015. It's high performance analytics based on in-memory computing HANA is the key component, and attracts much attention these days. Here's some brief notes:

SAP High performance analytics is composed of the following part:
- SAP In-memory computing engine (core of HANA)
- SAP In-memory computing studio (development platform)
- Business applications or other data sources.

After the acquisition of Sybase, SAP database technology now has a complete suite of solutions that covers the needs in all areas of business analytics. Here's the positioning of all the DB products:

- HANA: this in memory platform provides real-time decisions. It's the target platform for the SAP NetWeaver BW.

- Sybase ASE: it is the main supported option for SAP Business Suite applications, which is GA in Apr. 2012. HANA will augment the extreme transactions of SAP Sybase ASE with real-time reporting capabilities.

- Sybase SQL Anywhere: front-end database for HANA, extending its reach to mobile and embedded applications in real time.

- Sybase IQ: a “big data” analytics tool, providing progressive integration with HANA for working with aged or cold data. HANA and Sybase IQ are also planned to extend support for accessing “big data” sources such as Hadoop, offering a pre-processing infrastructure.

If we classify from the business analytics phase:
- Front end data source: Transactional data from ASE, or Streaming data from ESP
- Real-time analysis: HANA warehouse and data marts (for example: data from most recent 3 months)
- Progressive analysis: IQ (for example: data from past 19 months)