After four decades SAP ERP (now S/4 HANA) is reborn! Literally!

A lot of the biggest companies in the world have been running SAP for decades, maybe not with incredible performance but always with an "acceptable" performance.

What was the secret behind this "acceptable" performance? It was redundancy; basically you bend database normalisation rules and store some aggregated data for the sake of usability and performance.

Imagine if SAP did not use the redundant data (totals tables). When checking the balance of a ledger account you would need to wait (for minutes) because the system would need to read all related transactions first; thanks to the totals tables it only needs to read one record. But the drawback is that every time you save a new transaction, the system needs to update multiple totals tables.

The point here is: If you need multiple views of your data like by account, by vendor, by country, etc. you can create more and more of those totals tables, but then, every time you save a transaction the system will update all the totals tables you've created leading to slower transactions.

To further address the performance issue, satellite systems were born. Like BW (Business warehouse) that stores an aggregated copy of each transaction that happens in the main system. This way you can make ad-hoc reports on the duplicated data with an "acceptable" response time. Other satellite systems are: CRM, APO, etc.

Both, the use of totals tables and the introduction of satellite systems, successfully ensure performance by replicating main system transactions in multiple locations. This inevitably creates databases that grow huge and become hard to maintain in sync.

However, with the economic globalisation and phenomenas like the internet of things, too many transactions are being generated and systems need to keep up the pace. It seems that saving and updating the same data in multiple locations is not feasible anymore, or at least not optimal.

Eight years ago at the HPI, one of the SAP board members started a revolution, he said "Let's redesign enterprise systems with the following premise: A database that has 0 seconds response time". A new vision and SAP HANA were born.

On 3.Feb.2015 SAP S/4 HANA was launched as the result of that vision from eight years ago.  This new version of the SAP ERP and it's satellite systems don't need any of the old tricks for performance, no more totals tables, no more saving the same transactions in multiple locations. Everything is SIMPLE, that's what the S in the name stands for, and the 4 is because it's a 4th generation system.

This was an incredible task to achieve, since SAP had to rewrite almost all of its 400 millions of lines of code. As a result,  for example a system that has  593 GB database  can now fit in only 8GB, yes the storage space you probably have in your mobile device.

Are you ready for a new world of enterprise software?

If you are interested in more details watch the launch event video here.

Or read this https://blogs.saphana.com/2015/01/14/simple-finance-removes-redundancy-case-materialized-aggregates/.