SAP HANA’s Smart Data Access bridges hot in-memory data with your traditional EDW During the second half of 2013, the database and technology team at SAP has been hard at work to deliver major enhancements for the SAP HANA database. With SP6 and SP7, released just a few weeks ago, we will highlight a new key capability for the in-memory database we believe will provide immense benefits.

Smart Data Access.

Smart Data Access (SDA) provides SAP HANA with data virtualization capabilities. This technology allows customers to create a virtual table to combine SAP HANA data with other heterogeneous data sources like Hadoop, Teradata, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP Sybase ASE and/or SAP Sybase IQ.

One of the most interesting use-cases is that SDA enables SAP HANA customers to create a strategy where the most recent non-aggregated raw data (hot data) is stored in SAP HANA while the historical, aggregated or non-aggregated data (cold data) could be stored in the traditional enterprise data warehouse (EDW), the  remote source. With SDA, one single request will be able to access/combine both data sources and provide one single result set fully transparent to the end-user.

With this scenario, any SAP HANA customer will be able to use the power of the analytic models, predictive libraries or text search algorithms on data not stored in SAP HANA. This new capability will bridge a major challenge many organizations face today where analysis is required across a variety of heterogeneous data stores.

Many of our current and potential future customers are looking at in-memory technology, so we will continue to see major innovation driven by SAP and its peers as we enter a new era of analytics. We look forward to discussing how the new capabilities will benefit your organization to drive more profitable, agile business decisions.