SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is an example of a cloud data warehouse solution that is built to enable business professionals to query and analyze data without relying on IT.
SAP has announced at the TechEd Barcelona the general availability of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud, which are available as standalone or as extensions to SAP customers’ on-premises environments.
SAP HANA Cloud Services, comprised of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud, and SAP Analytics Cloud, provides solutions as a set of interconnected services to store, process, govern and consume large volumes of data.
Andrew Brust shared in an article in ZDNet the insights he got from Philip On, SAP’s global vice president of product marketing for platform and technologies, and Neil McGovern who leads product marketing worldwide for SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud Services.
SAP HANA Cloud
The SAP leaders explained that HANA Cloud, built on the in-memory database HANA, is SAP’s database as a service (DBaaS) offering that has some enhancements such as:
- HANA Cloud utilizes HANA’s Native Storage Extension (NSE) technology to allow disk-based tables
- HANA Cloud allows storage in the SAP HANA data lake (based on the Sybase IQ columnar database)
- HANA Cloud can connect to external data in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or cloud object stores including Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, powered by SAP HANA, is the German company’s data warehouse as a service (DWaaS) offering that is fully managed and is elastically provisioned and priced. It is the first enterprise-ready data warehouse in the cloud, uniquely designed for business and IT that unites all data sources in one solution, maintaining the security, trust, and semantic richness of information.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud has pre-built templates, integration with SAP and other data sources that enable the service to bring faster results, simple cloud-based end-user analytics, and allow flexibility to control costs and pay-for-what-you-use. SAP has announced a 30-day free trial of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
With SAP Analytics Cloud that can connect to the data warehouse product, Data Warehouse Cloud becomes an all-in offering covering database, data lake, data warehouse, and analytics, leveraging HANA, IQ and data virtualization of cloud data lake assets. The ERP software giant, as part of Data Warehouse Cloud, is also looking into its enterprise software expertise to provide analytic semantic models for an array of business domains.
Spaces
The Data Warehouse Cloud also offers Spaces, a self-service yet governed feature of the offering. Spaces help manage resources and customize SAP Data Warehouse Cloud’s user experience to the critical use cases. In essence, it is a sandboxed data mart that business units can provision, populating them with both governed internal data sources as well as external data such as social media content. Spaces addresses concerns on elasticity and scalability.
Spaces are based on an assigned quota of cores and memory/disk storage. IT has full governance over it and can “hibernate” Spaces that have gone unused and even promote a Space into the central DW.
SAP has also announced the next release of its on-premises business intelligence (BI) suite, BusinessObject 4.3, that will integrate more tightly with Analytics Cloud.
Juergen Mueller, SAP Chief Technology Officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE shared during the event:
“SAP ensures high levels of openness and flexibility including out-of-the-box integration, modularity, and ease of extension in cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployment models. With this open and flexible approach, SAP is committed to helping our customers achieve superior business outcomes.”
