The graph story of the SAP HANA database

Abstract

Many traditional and new business applications work with inherently graphstructured data and therefore benefit from graph abstractions and operations provided in the data management layer. The property graph data model not only offers schema flexibility but also permits managing and processing data and metadata jointly. By having typical graph operations implemented directly in the database engine and exposing them both in the form of an intuitive programming interface and a declarative language, complex business application logic can be expressed more easily and executed very efficiently. In this paper we describe our ongoing work to extend the SAP HANA database with built-in graph data support. We see this as a next step on the way to provide an efficient and intuitive data management platform for modern business applications with SAP HANA.