HANA modelling

The HANA database services provides you with data modeling tools to build graphical views on top of your HANA tables or other views.  These views can be consumed for different purposes, like business intelligence reporting or dashboards, analytical applications, planning functions, business functions,…

Three types of views can be created : attribute views, analytical views and calculation views. In the latest versions of SAP HANA,  attribute views and analytical views have become obsolete and are integrated in calculation views. So calculation views can model your attributes, analytical views and complex calculations.  The modeled views are stored in the repository, and actual database objects are generated from these definitions during their activation.  Attribute views used to model an entity base on the raltionships among attribute data contained in multiple source tables. It can model columns, calculated columns and hierarchies. Analytical views can be used to model data containing measures. Calculation views are used to provide composites of other views, while performing more complex data manipulations, such as joins, unions, filters, etc…

Benefits to creating modeled views are : optimized to exert the power of underlying process engines, can represent complex business scenarios, additional metadata generated on modeled views can be leveraged by multidimensional expression (MDX) clients.

When these views are not enough to express complex business requirements, you can create stored procedures. Stored procedures can be created with the SQLScript, L, R, and C++ languages. SQLScript can be used to write table functions, with a single table as output.  Also scalar functions can be created that returns one or more scalar values.

Contact us for more information on HANA modelling.