Nice post on SAP’s in-memory journey
“Towards end of 2006, close to 40 years after SAP was started, Hasso started speculating how to redo an enterprise system if he were to start from scratch and spent an entire day with his students to explain parts of how an accounting system worked then and what needed a redo. Hasso chuckles,“because I am a renegade and I wanted to do something different, I made a proposal to completely get rid of all aggregates, 40 years of aggregates, which was too radical a proposal then. I then made a proposal for all systems to take the time away from the line items and leave the day and aggregate. For every single line item, take the time away.” Hasso was convinced of his hypothesis that eliminating time of day would not result in any information loss from the transaction as in normal enterprise systems it shouldn’t matter whether something happened at 923 in the morning or 330 in afternoon. The challenge that he set for his students was to build a database to be so fast that we could build any aggregate the user community wanted on the fly within a reasonable response time on transactional data. The exercise to the students was to look at z processing, meaning for a given customer, looking down from the customer, get all orders, shipment, invoices, payment in a very short response time running sequentially through large database using secondary indices (what was already being done for 40 years). And what started as a research project marked the beginnings of SAP HANA. The dominating ethos was “Change the system fundamentally and yet use the traditional database technique.””
Here is Dr. Plattner presenting on some of the concepts at the 2010 SapphireNow. He was way ahead of the enterprise world.
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