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Why SAP HANAusers need Uniface

Adrian Gosbell, Uniface Vice President of Product

Management and Marketing

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Introduction: Why should businesses be interested in SAP HANA?Background: the need for ultra-fast data storage The arrival of big data – vast volumes of often unstructured data generated from social media and the Internet of Things as well as conventional applications – has coincided with a growing thirst for real-time business intelligence to drive better business decisions. Legacy data warehouses and analytics tools struggle to handle massive data volumes at the speed required, and so new technologies have emerged to fill the gap.

One of the best-known of these newer solutions is leading ERP vendor SAP’s HANA, which SAP describes as an “an in-memory platform that runs analytics applications smarter, business processes faster, and data infrastructures simpler”1

SAP HANA has a wide variety of uses. It is being billed as both a standalone product deployed with applications, or with tooling such as data analytic software, and as the preferred deployment database to be used with SAP ERP offerings – perhaps soon to be the only database option. SAP itself is keen to position it as more than just a fast database.

Potential applications for SAP HANA The origin of SAP HANA was a requirement to provide real-time analytics, which could be carried out either in situ on an operational database, or on a purpose-built data warehouse. According to Forrester Research Inc., the most common use of SAP HANA is currently as a data warehouse: an application where HANA’s high-performance DBMS incorporating in-memory technology can provide compelling speed and scalability.2 SAP has tested the scalability of SAP HANA to 100 terabytes. In addition, they have made various claims about the (high) performance of the product-claims often matched by Oracle with its competing solution.

Practical challenges in SAP HANA adoption As another Forrester report on SAP3 suggests, using SAP HANA brings significant cost savings through reduced hardware requirements, licensing/pricing models, simplified administration, and the opportunity to expand its use through the enterprise. Coupling these savings with the potential performance benefits makes SAP HANA look like a very compelling database option.

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1 http://hana.sap.com/abouthana.html 2 http://go.sap.com/docs/download/2015/04/e2bc34e5-1f7c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.pdf 3 http://news.sap.com/forrester-study-savings-potential-sap-hana/

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But there are also some important issues that must be addressed before customers can get the best from SAP HANA – for example:

• The low productivity of some of the development and integration tools that provide connectivity to the SAP HANA platform.

• Overly complicated and inflexible deployment tooling that doesn’t necessarily match SAP HANA’s performance and scalability capabilities.

• Concern that the development of any customized (SAP HANA specific) ERP features will not be upwards compatible.

• A lack of tools to facilitate easy and productive migration of data from legacy databases to SAP HANA.

Uniface plus SAP HANA: a winning combinationUniface can help SAP HANA adopters overcome all these difficulties and more. Uniface provides a model-driven environment for the rapid development of enterprise mission-critical applications. With continuous support for new technologies, Uniface is the development tool of choice for organizations that want to develop at a high level of abstraction and realize productivity unrivaled in the industry. Uniface is platform independent, allowing applications to work on the most widely used hardware platforms and operating environments.

The productivity of Uniface brings benefits to SAP HANA users from the moment Uniface is connected to the database, through the productivity of a model-driven approach and a simple-to-use development paradigm.

Uniface provides flexible connectivity to SAP HANA – productively Uniface offers dedicated drivers to connect to all mainstream relational databases including SAP HANA. The drivers transform generic Uniface database requests from the Uniface runtime into optimized database requests.

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The database drivers are Unicode enabled, which means that they provide full support for internationalization. They offer cross-platform support for many advanced features including:

• Pagination for disconnected apps

• Stepped hit-lists for connected apps

• Optimized Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) transaction support

• Database stored procedure support

• Ensuring that your app will work reliably and similarly on all deployment technologies.

Uniface provides users with multiple ways to access databases, including using the database vendor’s middleware combined with the Uniface server architecture. Uniface allows an application to be partitioned across multiple platforms, facilitating distributed apps.

In the case of SAP HANA, Uniface connects using a dedicated database driver. The Uniface SAP HANA driver connects to the SAP HANA database through SAP HANA client software known as HDB ODBC.

Because Uniface connects to the HDB ODBC client, the actual physical location of the database server (and therefore its data) is managed by SAP HANA. This makes life easy and simple for the development of the app, because the the Uniface connection is the same no matter if the database server is located on-premise, remotely, in the cloud, or a combination.

The technology-independent nature of Uniface means that the same connection architecture is available in all leading data sources, enabling simultaneous connectivity to SAP HANA and other databases.

Flexibility to choose between cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment The technology-independent capabilities of Uniface mean that applications can be deployed on a multitude of platforms, ranging from Windows and Linux through to legacy technologies such as proprietary UNIX. Uniface apps can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment with a combination of platforms. The hybrid option makes it easy to use legacy assets alongside SAP HANA.

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Creating a SAP HANA database from scratch Sometimes a customer needs to deploy a Uniface application into an empty database, without any legacy data considerations. Standard Uniface functionality automates much of the work involved in setting up the database, using definitions created in the Uniface model:

• The ‘create table’ utility generates the SQL scripts required to create all tables, indexes and stored procedures for CRUD transactions and to ensure required integrity.

• Uniface automatically checks the integrity of the database structure. If the database table structures do not exist, Uniface automatically generates them the first time they are needed. The structure of the tables is inherited from the Uniface model.

Automatically generating load definitions for importing data into a SAP HANA database The Uniface load definitions tooling enables the structure of an existing application to be automatically imported into the Uniface model, enabling access to the tables (and data) from a Uniface application. This automation brings multiple benefits, including:

• Productivity: There is no requirement to manually enter table and field structures, which is particularly important with enterprise applications that typically have many tables and many fields in tables. For example, SAP ERP has over 24,000 default tables. Setting up these manually, without Uniface, could require a considerable effort.

• Reduced risk: The risk of human error is eliminated by removing the need to manually extract definitions of the database structure and then manually re-enter them in a development tool. This becomes particularly important with ERP applications where customized tables have been implemented (for example, SAP has a concept called Z-tables in the SAP ERP). Here, accurate knowledge or documentation is critical; mistakes could lead to application malfunction or even data corruption.

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Easier data conversion and use of multiple databases Uniface’s ability to act as a data conversion tool, where one (or more) of the data sources is a SAP HANA database, has several benefits. The most notable is that it facilitates access to multiple databases from one application.

There are two main scenarios where access to multiple databases is required: first, a one-time conversion from one database to another, and second, the use of data from multiple sources within an application. 1. A one-time conversion, usually from a legacy database to a new deployment database such as SAP HANA Moving from one database to another is a significant decision for a business. Such a decision is usually driven by cost, for example licensing or hardware/server costs, or by additional functionality requirements, for example the need for additional performance and functional capabilities within the database. Moving from one database to another could be a ‘like for like’ exercise, where the data in the new, target database is an identical copy of the legacy or source database. But there will often be the need to transform some of the data to a new format as part of this exercise: for example, to take advantage of new, more efficient storage formats that are available in the new database, or to comply with a new industry format. There could also be a need to convert data as part of the exercise: for example to consolidate or cleanse it.

With Uniface, converting data as part of the process of moving it from one database to another is a relatively simple exercise, as the product provides functionality to help developers transform data between formats. The productivity benefits of Uniface can also make a huge impact, as developers are not required to write large quantities of code. In particular:

• Field attributes defined in the Uniface model will result in new storage formats automatically being written into the target database.

• The simplicity of the Uniface scripting language means that any changes actually requiring programming can be done with minimal code, resulting in efficient use of development and testing resources.

Although Uniface will create tables ‘on the fly’ if they do not exist, it is generally best practice to use the Uniface ‘create table’ utility to generate SQL scripts to set up the tables. The DBA can then execute these scripts in the empty database. This resolves potential permission issues where users may not have the rights to create tables. It also provides the DBA with the opportunity to optimize and tune, although this work can also be carried out after the database has been created and populated with data, and after database analytics (for performance, efficiency, etc.) have been executed.

The Uniface model is the core of an application and contains business rules that are inherited by the application. This approach has major productivity benefits in both the initial development of the application and ongoing maintenance:

• Modeled business logic is defined once and can be reused throughout the application, no matter what the client type. The logic is available for use by web services, batch jobs, and any other type of process.

• Any subsequent business changes are inherited by the application, making maintenance and testing simple and efficient, promoting the long-term sustainability of Uniface applications.

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2. Accessing multiple data sources simultaneously, and using that data in an application Often, there are good business reasons why it is not possible to simply replace an entire database. Applications may therefore need to access data from more than one source, including legacy databases.

Uniface apps have the capability to connect to multiple databases simultaneously, access the data, and use it within the application. With Uniface, this is about more than just read-only transactions: All transaction types (read, write, edit and delete) are available. Another very relevant Uniface feature is the capability to manage the connectivity (and disconnection) of data sources, which could be important where there are charges for data access or where some data is in a remote location.

The benefits of using Uniface as a data conversion tool are discussed in more detail in a separate Uniface whitepaper titled, Data Conversion for Modern Applications: www.uniface.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/wp-data-conversion.pdf

Integration of Uniface functionality with third-party applications Uniface offers multiple integration options through all tiers of the application architecture. With the use of technologies and approaches such as JavaScript, REST, Web Services, stored procedures, SQL, etc., integration points are available throughout the application architecture, from the client, to the business logic, to the database tier. Integrating at the database tier using Uniface is often a good option when there is a need to deliver customizations to packaged applications.

Customizing packaged applications in the conventional way can be an expensive process, given that it involves licensing costs for software tooling, the cost of developer resources, and the overall time taken to deliver a product (or service) to market. Another important consideration, often overlooked, is the cost of ownership of customizations:

• Further customizations are likely to be needed when business requirements change; these can be expensive and complex, requiring specialized skills.

• Customizations of applications are often not upwards compatible when the overall application is upgraded to new versions, leading to the need to rework what has already been implemented.

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The ‘convert data’ utility enables the conversion of data using MAP files to define the format target data. MAP files provide a lot of flexibility including, the ability to:

• Split data across tables

• Split data to/from single to multiple columns

• Transform field formats

• Export to/from XML

• Profile source data

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Why SAP HANA users need Uniface

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Uniface offers a viable alternative to customizing packaged applications. Businesses can use Uniface to connect to the application database, and then use the Uniface load definitions utility to automatically import the application database structure into a Uniface model, without the need for any manual steps from the developer. With the data defined in the Uniface model, it is possible to create Uniface services to carry out any business logic operations, and/or create user interfaces to display the data for mobile, web or client server application users.

It’s also possible to use Uniface to access the application data and then provide the data via web services for use by other, external applications. Using Uniface rather than the application provider’s integration platform can result in considerable savings in license fees.

Once in deployment, some of the Uniface core features will add value over the longer term, further reducing cost of ownership:

• Uniface applications are always upwards compatible, meaning that existing applications will continue to operate in newer versions of Uniface, eliminating the costs and frustration of rework.

• Uniface is kept abreast of technology innovations, providing users with a migration path to continually modernize and upgrade their applications. For example, applications that were originally designed to be deployed on character mode ‘green screen’ terminals are still operating, but have been modernized for deployment in browsers, or on mobile platforms.

It’s also worth noting that several Uniface system integration partners specialize in providing services around data tier integration, offering subject matter expertise in both Uniface and ERP applications.

If you’re thinking SAP HANA, think UnifaceHowever you’re planning to use SAP HANA, you’re almost certain to need to connect to existing applications and data in some way – whether just during implementation or as part of ongoing operations. Uniface has all the flexible connectivity and data manipulation abilities that you’re ever likely to need, plus the ability to add extra functionality in the most productive and future-proof way yet invented.

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