SAP has been trying hard to demonstrate the business case for its in-memory, RDBMS-killer--Hana. A key issue has been proving both Hana’s scalability and appropriateness for serving as an analytical platform for large SAP transactional systems. The case for both of these proof points appears to have been significantly advanced by the results of recent internal benchmarks on Hana that SAP shared with me this week.

The results are unverified and therefore must be viewed in light of the on-going Oracle-SAP marketing war. But at a minimum, the data puts the onus on Oracle to match or better, if it can, what look to be relatively impressive numbers.

Here’s a summary of this latest Hana scalability test: 100 billion records of relational data, representing five year's worth of SAP sales and distribution data, were loaded into Hana, which compressed the original 100 terabytes of disk data down to 3.8 terabytes of RAM. The Hana system was running on a commercially available IBM X5 16-node cluster, which is four times as large as the platform used for SAP’s previous Hana scalability test. The cost of such a system would be around $600,000, SAP says.

[ Want to read more from Josh Greenbaum on SAP? See SAP's Success And Looming Challenges. ]

What's impressive is that SAP is claiming that not only does this configuration deliver sub-second response times--300 to 500 milliseconds for a set of standard SAP Business Warehouse-like queries--but that this is the identical query response time it got when it ran Hana on the smaller 4-node X5 cluster. Equally impressive is that these response times were achieved with no database tuning; the data were partitioned at load time, but nothing in the way of typical RDBMS tuning tricks were used to achieve these results. The test also included ad hoc (as opposed to BW-like) analyses that compared customer data across different time periods with equally impressive results. Being able to do this without using material views is another potential feather in Hana’s cap.

The benefits don’t just accrue to analysts looking to leverage data in the SAP Business Warehouse or a generic data warehouse. SAP is also counting on a tool called Landscape Transformation, which replicates data from the SAP transactional system to Hana, to let customers analyze real-time transactional data alongside their BW data using Hana.

There could be two possible and important effects from the results of these scalability tests, once they're independently verified. The first would take the Hana scalability issue off the table and drop it squarely in the competition’s court. And the second is that these results make the business case for Hana center on relative functionality and price/performance, making it a potential winner for both the business user and the IT department.

I’ve placed the caveats around this data for an important reason: SAP needs to have these results independently reviewed, and, once reviewed, Oracle and any other competitor that feels threatened by Hana should be given the opportunity to respond with scalability data of their own. If SAP’s data holds up under independent scrutiny, it will shift the competitive conversation in SAP’s favor. And that, in turn, will be further proof of the waning importance of relational technology as a cost-effective and functionally superior approach to modern analytics.

Josh Greenbaum is principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting, a Berkeley, Calif., firm that consults with end-user companies and enterprise software vendors large and small. Clients have included Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other firms that are sometimes analyzed in his columns. Write him at josh@eaconsult.com.

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