SAP SAP HANA Flashcards

24 sample cards from the SAP HANA deck

Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.

1. What is Core Data Services (CDS) in SAP HANA?

   A declarative, design-time data modeling infrastructure to define database artifacts (entities/tables, views, associations) using DDL-like syntax (HDBDD/.hdbcds), enabling semantically rich, transportable data models.

2. What is the difference between a table function and a scalar function in SAPScript?

   A table function returns a tabular result set (multiple rows/columns) and can be used in a FROM clause; a scalar function returns a single value and is used in expressions like calculated columns.

3. What is the SAP Web IDE / SAP Business Application Studio used for with HANA?

   Browser-based development environments for building HANA native (XSA/HDI) applications: creating CDS models, calculation views, SQLScript procedures, and full-stack apps, with Git integration and deployment to HDI containers.

4. What is an HDI (HANA Deployment Infrastructure) container?

   A schema-isolated, self-contained deployment target for design-time database artifacts in XS Advanced; it enables container-based development, dependency management, and clean deploy/undeploy of HANA objects.

5. What is the SAP HANA smart data access (SDA) feature?

   A data virtualization capability that lets HANA access remote data sources (other databases, Hadoop, etc.) as virtual tables in real time, without physically replicating the data into HANA.

6. What is Smart Data Integration (SDI) in SAP HANA?

   A framework for bulk/real-time data provisioning and transformation into HANA using adapters and the Data Provisioning Agent, supporting both batch replication and change-data-capture (real-time) with in-flight transformations (flowgraphs).

7. What is the difference between Smart Data Access (SDA) and Smart Data Integration (SDI)?

   SDA is virtualization (data stays remote, queried on demand); SDI physically moves/replicates data into HANA (batch or real-time) and can transform it. SDI also offers more adapters and real-time replication.

8. What is SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) Replication Server?

   A trigger-based, real-time data replication tool that replicates data from SAP and non-SAP source systems into HANA, capturing changes via database triggers in the source for near-real-time updates.

9. What is the SAP HANA Predictive Analysis Library (PAL)?

   A built-in Application Function Library (AFL) of pre-built machine-learning and statistical algorithms (classification, regression, clustering, time series, association) executed directly inside HANA via SQLScript for in-database predictive analytics.

10. Name three categories of algorithms provided by the SAP HANA PAL.

    Classification (e.g., decision trees, logistic regression, KNN), Clustering (e.g., K-means, DBSCAN), and Time-Series/Regression (e.g., ARIMA, exponential smoothing, linear regression); also association analysis (Apriori).

11. What is the objective function minimized by the K-Means clustering algorithm available in HANA PAL?

    The within-cluster sum of squared distances: $J = \sum_{i=1}^{k}\sum_{x \in C_i} \lVert x - \mu_i \rVert^{2}$, where $\mu_i$ is the centroid of cluster $C_i$.

12. What is the SAP HANA Business Function Library (BFL)?

    An Application Function Library containing pre-built financial and business functions (e.g., depreciation, cash-flow, moving average) callable from SQLScript for in-database business computations.

13. What is the Automated Predictive Library (APL) in SAP HANA?

    An AFL exposing SAP's automated machine-learning engine (from the former KXEN/Infinite Insight) that auto-builds and tunes predictive models (classification, regression, clustering, time series, recommendation) with minimal data-science expertise.

14. How does SAP HANA integrate with Hadoop/Big Data ecosystems?

    Via Smart Data Access (virtual tables over Hive/Spark), HANA Spark Controller, HANA Vora / Data Lake, and by federating queries across HANA in-memory data and cold data stored in Hadoop/HDFS or object storage.

15. What is the SAP HANA data tiering / temperature concept (hot, warm, cold)?

    A strategy to place data by access frequency: hot data in memory (fast, costly), warm data on disk-optimized stores like Native Storage Extension or Extension Nodes, and cold data in cheaper external stores (Data Lake/Hadoop), balancing cost and performance.

16. What is SAP HANA Native Storage Extension (NSE)?

    A built-in warm-data tier that keeps less-frequently-accessed column-store data on disk with a buffer cache, reducing memory footprint while keeping the data in the same HANA database and queryable transparently.

17. What is SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering?

    An integrated but separately licensed disk-based columnar store (Extended Store) for managing warm data, offloading large, infrequently accessed tables from main memory to a disk-based engine within the same HANA system.

18. How is SAP HANA used in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios?

    It ingests and stores high-volume, high-velocity sensor/streaming data, and with Smart Data Streaming / streaming analytics processes events in real time, then applies PAL predictive models for anomaly detection and predictive maintenance.

19. What was SAP HANA Smart Data Streaming (SDS) used for in IoT?

    A complex event processing (CEP) engine that continuously analyzes streams of incoming events (e.g., sensor data) in real time using continuous queries, filtering, aggregating, and triggering actions before or as data lands in HANA.

20. What is the SAP HANA spatial engine and its relevance to IoT/geospatial data?

    A built-in engine supporting spatial (geographic) data types and functions per the OGC standard (points, polygons, distance, intersection), enabling location-based analytics for IoT, logistics, and mapping directly in HANA.

21. What graph capability does SAP HANA provide?

    A native Graph engine that stores and processes graph data (vertices and edges) with algorithms like shortest path, neighborhood search, and pattern matching (via GraphScript/openCypher-like queries) for network and relationship analysis.

22. What is the relationship between SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA?

    S/4HANA is SAP's next-generation ERP business suite built to run exclusively on the SAP HANA database, leveraging HANA's in-memory speed for a simplified data model and real-time transactional + analytical processing.

23. What is the difference between OLTP and OLAP, and how does SAP HANA relate to both?

    OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) handles many short read/write transactions; OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) handles complex analytical queries over large data. SAP HANA unifies both (HTAP) in one system, eliminating the need for separate transactional and analytical databases.

24. What does HTAP stand for and how does SAP HANA deliver it?

    Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing — running analytics on live transactional data in a single database. HANA delivers it through its in-memory column store, which is fast enough for both transactional writes and real-time analytical reads without a separate data warehouse.

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