SAP HANA Architecture

SAP HANA Database High-Level Architecture 

A running SAP HANA system consists  of multiple communicating processes .

Traditional database application use well- defined interfaces (for example ,ODBC and JDBC ) to communicate with the database management system  functioning as a datasource , usually over a network connection.

Traditional database are often running in the context of an application server , these traditional  application use structured query language (SQL) to manage  and query the data stored in the database.

The main SAP HANA database  management component is know as index server  which contains

• the actual data stores  and the engine  for processing the data.
• the index server processes incoming SQL or MDX statements.

The SAP HANA database has its own scripting language named SQL script. SQL Script embeds data - intensive  application logic into the database.

Classical application tend to offload only very few limited functionality  into the database using SQL.

This results in extensive copying of data from and to the database and in the programs that slowly iterate over huge data loops and are hard to optimize and parallelize.

SQL Script is based on side effect free  functions that operates  on tables using SQL queries for set processing  and is therefore parallelizable over multiple processors.

SAP HANA supports a framework  for the installation of specialized  and optimized functional libraries , which are tightly integrated  with different  data engines  of the index server.

SAP HANA also supports the development of programs written in R language.

SQL and SQL Script are implemented  using a common infrastructure  of built -in data engine functions that have access to various meta data  definitions , such as definitions  of relational tables, columns views, and indexes ,and definitions of SQLScript procedures . This meta data is stored in one common catalog.

The database persistence layer is  responsible for durability and atomicity of transactions . It ensures that database can be restored to  the most recent committed state after a restart and that transactions are completely  executed  or completely undone.

The Index server  uses  the preprocessor server for analyzing the data  and extracting the information on which  the text search capabilities are  based . The name server  owns the information about the the topology  of SAP HANA system.

In a disturbed system, the name server names  where the components are running and which data is located on which server.