John Appleby leads business analytics and technology at Bluefin Solutions, a consulting firm that helps clients optimize SAP technology.

Seeing that SAP SapphireNow is next week in Orlando (theCube will broadcast live from the show), I thought it would help to point out two FAQs Appleby developed for SAP HANA. The first is a FAQ about HANA itself. The< a href="http://www.bluefinsolutions.com/insights/blog/the_sap_bw_on_hana_faq/">second and most recent, is a FAQ for SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse on HANA (SAP BW).

SAP HANA FAQ

Appleby’s SAP HANA FAQ provides a good overview of the in-memory database technology. He runs through the product names, some basics about the SAP HANA Appliance, the difference between SAP HANA and its in-memory database (IMDB) and what it’s great at and what’s bad about it.

Questions include:

• Why is SAP HANA so fast?
• What hardware is supported right now?
• What storage subsystem does SAP HANA use?
• What source databases does HANA support in real-time?

Here’s what he says about how SAP HANA compares to Oracle:

It’s the elephant in the room, but once the Business Suite runs on IMDB, Oracle won’t be needed any more by SAP customers who purchase HANA. This doesn’t affect anything in the short term because many of those people buying HANA today will still need an Oracle ERP system.

However if you run an Oracle or DB2 data mart that performs poorly, you could replace this outright with SAP HANA and that would allow you to actually eliminate some licenses today.

SAP BW HANA

SAP recently announced its SAP BW on HANA. Appleby points out that SAP BW has 17,000 SAP BW instances over 12,000 customers. Some of the questions he asks:

• What are the benefits of BW on HANA?
• What size appliances are supported?
• Is there still value in SAP HANA if I have BIA/BWA? ( BIA/BWA is the name for SAP’s previous generation in-memory solution.)
• What is involved in moving BW onto HANA?

Appleby is one of the more savvy in the SAP community. I found his FAQs helpful if nothing but to use as comparisons for what SAP announces next week at the Sapphire event.