SAP HANA – The Evolution of an In-Memory DBMS from Pure OLAP Processing Towards Mixed Workloads

Abstract

The journey of SAP HANA started as an in-memory appliance for complex, analytical applications. The success of the system quickly motivated SAP to broaden the scope from the OLAP workloads the system was initially architected for to also handle transactional workloads, in particular to support its Business Suite flagship product. In this paper, we highlight some of the core design changes to evolve an in-memory column store system towards handling OLTP workloads. We also discuss the challenges of running mixed workloads with low-latency OLTP queries and complex analytical queries in the context of the same database management system and give an outlook on the future database interaction patterns of modern business applications we see emerging currently.