Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Top features you'll want to know about
As you start to use SAP HANA, you will realize that there are a wide variety of things that
you can do with it. This section will teach you the most commonly performed tasks and most
commonly used features in SAP HANA.
We'll be expanding on the example that we built in the last section to use the more advanced
features of SAP HANA in creating a sales prevision system, using only the sample data, which
we've already seen. Our prevision application (or simulator) will allow the user to enter an
expected increase in sales (in percent), and then show, alongside the actual data, what that
percentage increase will translate to in projected sales.
We'll be using the same tables created earlier, and just expand our reporting application—no
new tables or data will be needed to create our sales simulator. The simulator will work on the
original data, and present results created on-the-fly. The advantage to this is that when new
data arrives in the underlying table (say we load data in from a new department), our simulator
will "just work"—no rework, fiddling, or tweaking necessary.
This is a fairly common scenario in business reporting and simulation applications. We'll see
that using only the standard tools available in SAP HANA, we can build this simulator relatively
quickly and with little fuss.
In order to build this application, we will be using the following building blocks:
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A second analytic view
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A filter
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A calculated attribute
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An input parameter
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A calculated measure
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A graphical calculation view with projections and a union
Finally, we will call up our application with Microsoft Excel, displaying simple integration with
SAP HANA.
Analytic view
The first thing we need to create is a second analytic view. This will enable us to compare our
projected sales with the actual sales.
As we saw in the previous section, we can create an analytic view by copying an existing view,
so we'll do that now.
