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SAP's in-memory database, HANA, could cause the biggest paradigm shift since the introduction of IBM's original PC in the 1980s, reports Computerworld UK.

Making the strong claims, Bluefin's information architecture and strategy capability lead Ian Brown says that HANA has made it possible for a finance director to sit in his office with a box in a cupboard next to him running two billion rows of data.

"HANA is effectively the ability to take an enterprise-scale database and put it in a single box," says Brown, "and it only costs £50,000. That may sound like a lot, but in the 80s businesses used to have to spend £10,000 to get things working on a PC, and that transformed the small business. You've now got a box which is not a million miles away from that. For big companies, they can put their numbers on it and run it live."

In a blog post on the Bluefin website, Brown identifies several similarities between the development and marketing of both the SAP HANA technology and the earlier IBM PC.

These include open, well-defined standards, flexible and scalable architecture, 'off-the-shelf' hardware and a focus on business value and engineering excellence.

"I believe SAP HANA will take off because it's going fundamentally to hit the same sweet-spot of huge corporate demand that drove the PC's takeover of most of the world," says Brown.

Launched in December 2010, HANA employs an in-memory computing engine, wherein data to be processed is held in RAM instead of being read from disks or flash storage, providing a performance boost. SAP intends HANA boxes to be attached to its own ERP systems, sucking in and analysing transactional data in real time. However, HANA's 'agnostic' data access functionality means any information source can be used.

"HANA will swallow anyone who's running BW on a SQL server, as they're likely to have a database that's small enough to run on HANA today," he said. "For the bigger enterprises currently running Oracle or DB2, the technology isn't there yet. Oracle databases tend to go up to around 30 Terabytes, whereas HANA can swallow around 2 Terabytes."

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