¶ Developing Hybrid Applications with HANA and Vora
Subject: SAP-Vora
Field: SAP Data Management and Analytics
Article No: 093
Modern enterprise applications demand high performance, scalability, and the ability to process diverse data types from multiple sources. SAP’s in-memory database platform, SAP HANA, combined with SAP Vora, a distributed computing engine for big data, provide a powerful duo for building hybrid applications that leverage both real-time transactional data and large-scale big data analytics.
This article explores the principles, architecture, and best practices for developing hybrid applications using SAP HANA and SAP Vora, enabling organizations to deliver rich, data-driven experiences.
Hybrid applications in the SAP ecosystem refer to applications that seamlessly integrate SAP HANA’s transactional, real-time processing capabilities with SAP Vora’s distributed, scalable analytics on big data platforms like Hadoop or cloud object stores.
The goal is to combine:
- Real-time operational data from SAP HANA
- Large-scale historical or external data processed by SAP Vora
This combination delivers insights that are both timely and comprehensive.
¶ Architecture of Hybrid Applications with HANA and Vora
- SAP HANA manages transactional, master, and real-time operational data.
- SAP Vora connects to distributed big data repositories such as HDFS, Amazon S3, or Azure Data Lake.
- SAP HANA provides high-speed in-memory processing and advanced analytics on structured data.
- SAP Vora extends Apache Spark with rich data models and SQL support for distributed data processing.
The integration between HANA and Vora can be achieved using:
- SAP HANA Smart Data Access (SDA) and Smart Data Integration (SDI) for virtual and real-time data federation.
- Apache Spark connectors and APIs to access Vora datasets from HANA.
- SAP Data Intelligence to orchestrate and manage data workflows across both platforms.
Business applications consume data and analytics results from both SAP HANA and SAP Vora via:
- SAP Fiori user interfaces
- Custom applications using OData services, REST APIs, or SQL interfaces
- Embedded analytics dashboards
- Real-Time Insights + Big Data Scale: Access immediate operational data alongside vast historical datasets.
- Improved Performance: Leverage HANA’s in-memory speed for real-time queries and Vora’s distributed architecture for complex, large-scale analytics.
- Flexibility: Combine relational, hierarchical, graph, and time-series data models.
- Cost Efficiency: Store cold data in cost-effective big data storage while keeping hot data in-memory.
- Advanced Analytics: Support machine learning and AI workflows by integrating datasets from both platforms.
- Design data models that clearly separate real-time transactional data (HANA) and big data (Vora).
- Use HANA calculation views to virtualize data across both platforms.
- Employ Vora’s graph and hierarchical data models where applicable.
- Use SDA and SDI to create virtual tables in HANA that point to Vora data.
- Employ SAP Data Intelligence pipelines for complex data transformations and orchestration.
- Monitor data freshness and consistency across environments.
¶ Security and Governance
- Implement consistent role-based access controls (RBAC) across HANA and Vora.
- Ensure data lineage and auditability using SAP Data Intelligence metadata and governance tools.
- Leverage enterprise identity providers for unified authentication.
- Push down as much processing as possible to the respective platforms.
- Cache frequently accessed Vora data in HANA for low-latency queries.
- Monitor workload distribution and tune Spark and HANA engines accordingly.
¶ Use Case Example: Retail Demand Forecasting
A retail company uses SAP HANA to capture real-time sales transactions and inventory data. Historical customer behavior, social media sentiment, and external market data are stored in a Hadoop cluster processed by SAP Vora.
The hybrid application combines these data sources to generate accurate demand forecasts, optimize inventory levels, and enable personalized marketing campaigns — all accessible via SAP Fiori dashboards.
Developing hybrid applications with SAP HANA and SAP Vora empowers organizations to harness the full potential of their data assets — real-time transactional data combined with extensive big data analytics. This approach provides a scalable, flexible, and high-performance platform to build next-generation data-driven applications.
By leveraging the strengths of both SAP HANA’s in-memory processing and SAP Vora’s distributed analytics, businesses can accelerate innovation, improve decision-making, and deliver superior user experiences.
Author: [Your Name]
Published: May 2025
Category: SAP Vora / Application Development