Frequently Asked Questions
SAP HANA Vora
SAP HANA Vora™: Gain Contextual Awareness
for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
SAP HANA Vora™ software enables digital businesses to innovate and compete
through in-the-moment contextual awareness. It lets you use familiar online
analytical processing (OLAP) and programming languages to quickly analyze all
available data in enterprise and Hadoop systems in a coherent way, bridging the
divide between enterprise data and the onslaught of Big Data generated by today’s
digital economy.
2
General Information About
SAP HANA Vora
3
Product Details: How It Works and
Compares to Other Offerings
5
Business Benefits for Companies
and Industries
SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT SAP HANA VORA
What is SAP HANA
Vora?
SAP HANA Vora is an in-memory query engine that plugs into the Apache
Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics
on Hadoop.
What are the challenges The digital economy generates massive amounts of data from virtually
endless sources – social networks, mobile apps, the Internet of Things, and
that companies face in
the like. Companies that want to tap into Big Data have experimented with
the digital economy?
Hadoop as a way to reduce storage costs. However, processing and analyzing data in Hadoop, especially within the context of existing enterprise
applications and analytics, have proved challenging for several reasons:
Inefficient data processing: Current batch-mode tools used to process
data in Hadoop are not well suited to the fast, drill-down nature of today’s
business questions.
Lack of business alignment: Data lakes and enterprise systems often
exist as separate entities, resulting in discrepancies. Unstructured raw
data in Hadoop lacks the necessary semantics for enriching enterprise
data to support context-aware decision making and discoveries in a
unified way.
High cost of managing Big Data: While Hadoop can store and access vast
amounts of detailed data at lower costs, it results in multiple data platforms across the enterprise, creating complexity and potential new risks
for IT.
How does SAP HANA
Vora address these
challenges?
SAP HANA Vora enables OLAP analysis of Hadoop data through data hierarchy enhancements in Spark SQL and compiled queries for accelerated
processing. SAP HANA Vora helps make decisions more precise through
interactive and drill-down analysis across corporate and Hadoop data.
Data scientists and developers can now readily enrich their dataset in
Hadoop with corporate data in the SAP HANA® database. It also reduces
complexity and cost by simplifying data access and processing across
SAP HANA and Hadoop.
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SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
SAP HANA Vora offers
three licensing options
to support different
requirements:
SAP HANA Vora™,
developer edition
SAP HANA Vora
SAP HANA Vora,
enterprise edition
Free
Subscription-based
pricing, 24-month
term license
Subscription-based
pricing, 24-month term
license
On premise and cloud
– price based on
number of nodes
per year
On premise and cloud
– price based on
number of nodes
per year
Community support
only
SAP support
SAP support
Cannot be deployed
in production
Full use
Full use, including
access rights to SAP
data in Hadoop via
SAP HANA Vora
without licensing
SAP named users
Available in the cloud
(SAP HANA® Cloud
Platform; Amazon
Web Services
– infrastructure
fees apply)
PRODUCT DETAILS: HOW IT WORKS AND COMPARES
TO OTHER OFFERINGS
What are the
key features of
SAP HANA Vora?
SAP HANA Vora includes a unique set of features and capabilities:
•• An in-memory query engine that runs on Apache Spark execution
framework
•• Compiled queries for accelerated processing across Hadoop Distributed
File System (HDFS) nodes
•• Enhanced Spark SQL semantic to include hierarchies to enable OLAP
and drill-down analysis
•• Enhanced mashup application programming interface (API) for easier
access to enterprise application data for machine learning workloads
•• Support for all Hadoop distributions
•• An open development interface
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SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
Products
What are the major
differences in Apache
Spark, SAP HANA Vora,
Description
and the SAP HANA
platform?
Key
capabilities
Apache Spark
SAP HANA
Vora™
SAP HANA®
platform
An open-source,
in-memory data
processing framework for Hadoop
In-memory
query engine
that plugs into
Spark execution
framework
In-memory data
and application
platform; fully
atomicity, consistency, isolation,
durability (ACID)
compliant to
support missioncritical deployment
requirements for
data centers and
cloud
For Hadoop
•• Unified
framework for
building data
pipelines
•• Streaming,
interactive SQL
queries, graph
computation,
and machine
learning
For enterprise
apps/analytics
with Hadoop
•• Enriched interactive query analysis of Hadoop
data with data
hierarchies and
time-dependent
hierarchies
•• Enhanced
mashup API for
easier access of
enterprise app
data in machine
learning
workloads
•• Compiled queries
for accelerated
queries across
nodes
For enterprise
apps/analytics
Core development
and deployment
platform for:
•• New generation
of applications
such as hybrid
transaction-­
analytic
applications
•• Real-time analytics embedded
within applications or across
enterprise
analytic landscapes (data
mart + data
warehousing +
data lakes)
•• Acceleration of
existing application or business
intelligence
workloads
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SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
What is the relationship
between SAP HANA
Vora and SAP HANA
platform?
SAP HANA Vora is designed to work synergistically with the SAP HANA
platform to provide end-to-end in-memory computing across enterprise
data in SAP HANA and Hadoop systems. Both the SAP HANA platform and
SAP HANA Vora are also independent products and can be used separately to support different use cases. The SAP HANA platform does not
require SAP HANA Vora to run, or vice versa.
What is the relationship
between SAP HANA
Vora and Apache
Hadoop and Spark?
SAP HANA Vora provides enriched features for the Spark execution framework, such as data hierarchies that enable drill-down processing of raw
data. SAP HANA Vora will also provide features such as time-dependent
hierarchies, unit-of-measure conversion, and currency conversion to make
data easier to use in business settings. For more detail on the differences
between SAP HANA Vora and Apache Spark, please see the comparison
table above.
How do I use SAP
HANA Vora if I already
have Apache Hadoop
and Spark installed?
You can deploy SAP HANA Vora on an existing Hadoop installation as long
as that installation meets the prerequisites stated in the installation
manual for SAP HANA Vora.
BUSINESS BENEFITS FOR COMPANIES AND INDUSTRIES
Who will benefit by
using SAP HANA Vora?
SAP HANA Vora will deliver the most value to people in the following
positions:
Business analysts can perform root cause analysis using interactive
queries across both business and Hadoop data to better understand
business context.
Data scientists can discover patterns by trying new modeling techniques
with a combination of business and Hadoop data, all without duplicating
data copies within data lakes.
Software developers can deploy a query engine within applications that
can span enterprise and Hadoop systems using familiar programming
tools.
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SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
What are the main
benefits of using
SAP HANA Vora?
SAP HANA Vora enables precision decision making through interactive
and drill-down analysis across corporate and Hadoop data. It democratizes access for data scientists and developers who can now easily enrich
their raw dataset in Hadoop with corporate data in SAP HANA. And unifying SAP HANA and Hadoop in the landscape simplifies ownership of
Big Data for the IT department.
How can different
industries use
SAP HANA Vora to
solve key challenges?
Financial services
••Fraud detection – Detect anomalies and rogue trades by analyzing
historical trends and current data simultaneously.
••Risk mitigation – Perform Monte Carlo simulations to produce distributions of possible outcome values with more precise context.
••360-degree customer marketing – Combine customer data with
unstructured data from social media, e-mail, Web site activity, and
discussion forums to better target sales and marketing.
Utilities
••Predictive maintenance – Optimize maintenance of transformers and
low tension devices through more complete historical information.
••Virtual power plants – Forecast consumption and production based on
weather, load profiles, and so forth with better context.
••Analytics – Perform powerful analytics for infrastructure optimization,
energy theft detection, load balancing, and more.
••Archiving – Keep archived smart meter, billing, supervisory control and
data acquisition (SCADA), and customer relationship management data
at the ready but a lower cost.
Continued on next page
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SAP HANA Vora: Gain Contextual Awareness for a Smarter Digital Enterprise
How can different
industries use
SAP HANA Vora to
solve key challenges?
Telecommunications
••Network capacity planning – Analyze call detail records (CDRs) and
network load to plan infrastructure expansion with greater precision.
••Real-time bandwidth allocation – Steer traffic and optimize network
quality of service (QoS) in real time to maintain the best service quality.
••Cell phone service improvement – Analyze and improve instances of
poor cellular service, such as dropped calls or poor audio, by adding in
relevant data.
••Targeted network maintenance and upgrades – Analyze the impact of
cable network congestion on churn, and identify which network
upgrades will produce greater incremental revenue.
Healthcare
••360-degree patient view – Converge test, genomic, archive, patient
care, and patient history from many sources into a unified view.
••Insurance and Medicare fraud analysis – Analyze vast bodies of
collected claims material to uncover fraud.
••Confirm diagnosis with collected literature – Bring together patient
data with up-to-date journal and medical literature data in real time to
improve diagnoses and treatment plans.
••Improve research – Analyze more data from more studies in a
converged environment for statistical clues to patient outcomes
Find Out More
To find out more about SAP HANA Vora, visit us online at www.sap.com/hana-vora.
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