HANA vs BWA

BW Accelerator (BWA) and HANA both are in-memory tools and provide you the options to accelerate the query performance by persisting copies of InfoCube in-memory. BWA was the first to bring in-memory concept to Data Warehousing and SAP HANA allows the entire applications to run on HANA in-memory database.

Following are the key differences between SAP HANA and BWA −

BW Accelerator (BWA)

  • BW Accelerator is specifically designed for Business Warehouse system 7.0 or higher to accelerate the query performance. It reduces the data acquisition time by persisting copies of InfoCube data in-memory.

  • BWA is a solution to achieve better performance without making any changes to BI/BW application.

  • It reads SAP BW/BI data and provides accelerated read process and feeds the results to BI/BW queries.

  • You can create BEx reports or reporting in Analytical tool like BusinessObjects or even Dashboards using accelerated queries with BWA.

SAP HANA In-Memory

SAP HANA is an in-memory database and platform to provide high performance analytical applications. Data can be replicated to HANA database from SAP and non-SAP data sources and viewed and analyzed using BusinessObjects reporting tools.

  • SAP HANA supports real-time data load and reporting using SLT replication triggerbased data provisioning.

  • Data sets are loaded to SAP HANA and using BI tools you can consume HANA data models for data analysis and reporting.

  • You can access SAP and non-SAP data in SAP HANA, including SAP BW.

  • Data is stored in column-based storage and hence provides data compression and less time to perform aggregations. There is no need to save aggregated data and aggregations can be performed on the fly.

Note −

  • When you migrate SAP BW powered by HANA, BWA is obsolete. You can check with the BWA hardware vendor to credit BWA license. Few hardware vendors allow you to credit BWA hardware when you get a new hardware appliance of SAP HANA.

  • Query run-time on SAP BW on HANA and BWA is comparable. In some scenarios, queries run faster on BW on HANA as compared to BWA.

  • When you use BW on HANA, all BWA index build is eliminated. When data load is performed, it is immediately available.

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