SAP HANA Live Overview

简要：HANA Live是类似BW里的BI Content的一个补丁包。HANA Live and BW on HANA are 2 different things. HANA Live is mainly for scenario where customer have connected their ERP/CRM/SRM module to HANA and want to do analytics on top of ERP/CRM/SRM data using HANA.
In case of BW on HANA, HANA Live does not make much sense.

What is SAP HANA Live?

SAP HANA Live (previously known as SHAF – SAP HANA Analytic Foundation) is solution for real-time reporting on HANA.
It is a separate package that comes with predefined SAP HANA content across the SAP Business Suite.

What does SAP HANA Live provides?
SAP HANA Live provides SAP-delivered content (similar in concept like SAP BW content), in form of SAP HANA calculation views for real-time operational reporting.  The calculation views spans across majority of ECC modules (FI, CO, MM, PP, SD, PS, CRM, GTS, AM and GRC).

The content is represented as a VDM – virtual data model, which is based on the transactional and master data tables of the SAP Business Suite.

Currently more than 2000 views are delivered in HANA Live Package.

Architecture of HANA Live:

HANA Live calculation views are designed on top of SAP Business Suite tables. These views are optimized for best performance and analytic purposes. These views form a Virtual Data Model (VDM) that customers and partners can reuse.
Data provided by the virtual data model can be presented through multi-purpose analytical UIs, such as SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite UIs, and domain-specific web applications.

The HANA Live views are divided into 3 categories:

• Query Views: The views which are exposed for consumption by end user for reporting needs.
• Reusable views: Customers can build upon reusable views to create their own custom query views.
• Private Views: Views that are built on top of the tables and not intended to be changed.

Advantages of HANA Live:

SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite provides the following advantages compared to regular reporting solutions:

Open
Any access to the reporting framework is based on standard mechanisms such as SQL or MDX. No BW modeling or ABAP programming will be required.

Uniform
One approach is chosen for all SAP Business Suite applications, enabling a common reporting across application boundaries.

Intuitive
The virtual data model hides the complexity and Customizing dependencies of our SAP Business Suite data model to make data available without requiring a deep understanding of SAP models.

Fast
SAP HANA Live for SAP Business Suite features SAP HANA as the underlying computing engine, to enable fast analytics on high data volumes.

Real-time
Since all reporting happens on primary data (or a real-time replication of it), there is no need to wait for data warehousing loading jobs to finish. The cycle time from recording to reporting is dramatically reduced.

How HANA Live helps customers?

If customers wants to create a new custom report or modify/enhance existing reports on native ECC it takes lot of time to find right ABAP resources, coding in ABAP, testing and promoting to various stages and finally release it.

With SAP HANA Live all customers have to do is edit existing Virtual models/Views provided by SAP or create new HANA Models or Views to support new development in less time and all is happening in virtual layer and the development is much efficient, faster and no need to know ABAP.

This reduces development time and there by cost of development and support, increases SAP usability by a faster development time. We can easily create cross functional reporting across various SAP modules.

Deployment Options for HANA Live:

There are 2 deployment options for HANA Live.

Side-by-side scenario
In the side-by-side scenario, the database tables that are used by the SAP HANA Live products need to be replicated from the corresponding SAP Business Suite back-end system into the SAP HANA database. This is done using SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server. If you want to execute SAP HANA Live views, the data from the corresponding tables must be available.

SAP recommends to create all required tables as specified in the SAP Notes corresponding to the SAP HANA Live products, and to replicate the data only for those tables that are used in executed analytical scenarios. This ensures that no unnecessary data is replicated, that no unnecessary SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server resources are consumed, and that no unnecessary DB memory is consumed.

Integrated scenario
In the integrated scenario, you do not need to create and replicate the database tables, as they are already available in the SAP HANA database. They are maintained through the data dictionary of the corresponding ABAP Application Server. Therefore, all steps regarding table creation and data replication are not relevant in this scenario.

Since the ABAP server creates all tables in one specific database catalog schema (typically ), this needs to be mapped to the authoring schema of the imported content packages.
See Schema Mapping.

Frontend tools for HANA Live reporting:

SAP HANA Live reports can be accessed by HTML 5, native Excel or SAP BusinessObjects Business Analytics applications.

Following SAP BusinessObjects analytical solutions are recommended:

• SAP Crystals Reports for Enterprise 4.0.4
• SAP BusinessObjects Analysis (Edition for Microsoft Office) 1.0.3
• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0.4
• SAP Lumira

Backend tools to access HANA Live views:

HANA Live back-end can be accessed using the SAP HANA Studio. We can also use html-based SAP HANA Live View Browser to access the structures and elements of the virtual data model.

SAP HANA Live Tools:
SAP HANA Live Browser:
With this application you can quickly and easily search, browse, tag and consume HANA analytical content views using an internet web browser. This application is available as an option for business users who want to consume HANA content views or preview data without using HANA studio.
You can access the application using the URL http://:80/sap/hba/explorer

SAP HANA Live Authorization Assistant:
With the SAP HANA Live Authorization Assistant, you can provide users authorizations in the SAP HANA system that is required to access business data displayed by the virtual data model of SAP HANA Live.
SAP HANA Live Authorization Assistant is used to manage both the analytical privileges that are restricting access to specific business data, and the object privileges that are controlling the database views the user uses to report.