1. What is Sap HANA?

SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that is deployable as an appliance or in the cloud. At its core, it
is an innovative in-memory relational database management system that makes full sense of the
capabilities of current hardware to increase application performance, to reduce cost of ownership, and to
enable new scenarios and applications that were not possible before. With SAP HANA, you have the
opportunity to build applications that integrate the business logic, control logic, and the database layer
with unprecedented performance. As a developer, one of the key questions is how you can minimize data
movements. The more you can do directly on the data in memory next to the CPUs, the better the
application will perform.
2. What is SLT?
SLT stands for SAP Landscape Transformation which is a trigger based replication. SLT replication server is
the replication technology to pass data from source system to the target system. The source can be either
SAP or non-SAP. Target system is SAP HANA system which contains HANA database.
3. Explain how SQL Script procedure is processed in HANA database?
When a user creates a new procedure, the HANA database query compiler first:
Parse the statements
Check the statement semantic correctness
Optimize the code for Declarative and Imperative logic
Code generation creates Calculation models for Declarative logic and L nodes for Imperative logic
Compiled procedure creates Content in the database Catalog and in Repository.
4. What is the Language SAP HANA is developed in?
The majority of the SAP HANA software stack was written in C++. In fact, when you compile SAP HANA
objects, they do in turn become C++ code, which is one of the reasons why HANA is so fast. The
Predictive Analysis Library and Business Function Libraries are also written in a HANA-specific variant of
C++ called L-Language, which provides memory protection.
Certain optimizations have been made using C and machine code, which is common for many databases.
In addition, a lot of the tooling for HANA was written in Python, for ease of writing and adaption.
Since SAP HANA contains a web server, a lot of code is now written in HTML and Server-Side JavaScript
including the SAPUI5 library and Apache Orion-based Web Editors.
5. What is the operating system supported by HANA?
Currently SUSE Linux Enterprise Server x86-64 (SLES) 11 SP1 is the Operating System supported by SAP
HANA.
6. What are the row-based and column based approach in SAP HANA?
Row Based Tables:

It is the traditional Relational Database approach

It Store a table in a sequence of rows

Column Based Tables:

It store a table in a sequence of columns i.e. the entries of a column is stored in contiguous
memory locations

SAP HANA is particularly optimized for column-order storage.

SAP HANA support both row-based and column-based approach.

7. Explain HANA database Architecture (SP05)?

Clients connect to the database system which forms a session within the database in the form of SQL
statements. In the HANA database, each SQL statement is processed in the context of a transaction. New
sessions are assigned to a new transaction. Traditional database applications uses JDBC and ODBC
interface to communicate with the database management system over a network connection and
application uses SQL to manage and query the data stored in the database. In the HANA database Index
server is the

main component of database management which contains the actual data stores and the

engines for processing the data. The index server processes incoming SQL or MDX statements in the
context of transaction.
The Transaction manager coordinates database transactions, and keeps track of running and closed
transactions. When a transaction is committed or rolled back, the transaction manager informs the
involved storage engines about this event so they can execute necessary

actions.

The HANA database has its own scripting language called SQLScript that is designed to enable
optimization and parallelization. HANA supports the Business Functional Library (BFL) and Predictive
Analysis Library (PAL) and can be called directly from within SQLScript. It also supports the development
of programs written in R language.
SQL and SQLScript are implemented using a common infrastructure of Built-in functions. That have access
to various meta definitions such as definitions of relational tables, columns, views, and indexes, definitions
of SQLScript procedures. This Metadata is stored in one common catalog (row store or column store).
The Persistence layer ensures that the database after a restart is restored to the most recent committed
state. It uses a combination of write-ahead logs, shadow paging and save points. The persistence layer
also contains Logger that manages the transaction log.
The Index server uses the Preprocessor Server for analyzing the text data and extracting the information
based on text search capabilities. The Name Server knows where the components are running and which
data is located on which server. The Statistics Server collects information about status, performance and
resource consumption from other servers in the system.
8. How to upload data from Flat files in SAP HANA?
File menu Import
In Select an Import Source section, expand the SAP HANA Content node

Select Data from Local file and choose Next

Select the Target system to which you want to import the data using Flat file, choose Next
In Define Properties Import Page browse the file containing the data
Select New option (If you want to load the data into a new table) or
Select the Existing option (If you want to append the data to an existing table)
Click Finish.
9. How does SAP HANA compare to Oracle or IBM?
SAP HANA was designed to be a replacement to Oracle or IBM databases, either for net new installations
or for existing customers. In most cases it is possible to move off those databases easily, and gain
reporting performance benefits out of the box. Then it is possible to adapt the software to contain
functions that were not possible in the past.
All three of the major RDBMS vendors have released in-memory add-ins to their databases in the last
year. All of them support taking an additional copy of data in an in-memory cache, or in IBMs case
columnar tables. All of them provide improved performance for custom data-marts. But make no mistake;
caching data has been around for a long time, while an in-memory database platform to run transactions
and analytics together in the same instance is a new innovation.
Traditional database caching solutions are similar to the GM and Ford response to hybrid cars take their
existing technology and bolt new technology to it. SAP HANA is more akin to Tesla, who rebuilt the car
from the ground up based on a new paradigm.
And so HANAs capabilities from a business application perspective are 3 years ahead in technology from
what others have.
10. What makes SAP HANA fundamentally different?
SAP HANA is different by design. It stores all data in-memory, in columnar format and compressed.
Because HANA is so fast, sums, indexes, materialized views and aggregates are not required, and this can
reduce the database footprint by 95%. Everything is calculated on-demand, on the fly, in main memory.
This makes it possible for companies to run OLTP and analytics applications on the same instance at the
same time, and to allow for any type of real-time, ad hoc queries and analysis.
On top of this SAP built solutions to all the problems of columnar databases, like concurrency (HANA uses
MVCC) and row-level insert and update performance (HANA uses various mechanisms like a delta store).
If this wasnt enough SAP added a bunch of engines inside HANA to provide virtual OLAP functionality,
data virtualization, tex analysis, search, geospatial, graph (will be available soon) and web. It supports
open standards like REST, JSON, ODBO, MDX, ODbc and JDBC. There is as much functionality in there as a
whole Oracle or IBM software stack, in one database.