The traditional relational database management system within a SAP environment will be replaced by what? About 80% of the world's structured data resides in an Oracle, IBM DB2, or MySQL database. A pretty big large repository of big data sits in one of those traditional RDBMS and is at the core of the typical SAP installation. SAP believes those traditional RDBMS installations will all go away. When will this transition take place and more importantly how?

According to the CIO of SAP, they are likely to move away from relational databases in the future - approxmately in a 10 year timeframe. The new SAP focus will be on its in-memory offering named HANA. 

This is according to comments made by SAP's CIO, Oliver Bussmann, who spoke to Computing Magazine at the SAP User Group Conference recently in the UK.

HANA uses in-memory software to analyse huge volumes of data in real time. The proliferation of cheap memory and inexpensive processors has now made the case for less expensive data wharehouse computing costs by moving data off of DASD and into memory.

"My prediction is that in the next five to ten years relational databases will disappear and all SAP products will be using HANA," said Bussmann. 

"In-memory allows companies to improve the speed of their data analytics by a factor of 100,000. (This is compared with relational databases that are largely disk based systems.) This means that analytics processing that traditionally took hours can now take a seconds."

According to Bussman, SAP began looking at in-memory capabilities three years ago and started developing the technology in early 2010.

Bussmann's team conducted a proof of concept in October of 2010, which saw SAP's data analytics improve by a factor of 14,000: a request now takes one second where it previously took five hours.

SAP then delivered a roadmap for companies to utilise HANA, and 100 of its customers have now implemented the technology.

"The first step is for companies to put the HANA appliance alongside an ERP system. Then you should extract as much data as possible, put it inside the HANA appliance, and run analytics on top of that in real time," said Bussmann.

"Companies should build applications that are 100 per cent optimised on the HANA software. There are many examples of this already, and these include liquidity and risk-planning for banks."

Bussmann said that many companies are now looking at in-memory data analytics because the technology has become cheaper in recent years. "We realized that memory has become very inexpensive. You can get a 2 terabyte machine for $140,000 configured with 64 processers.It is now pretty cheap to own the hardware," he said.

"However, you need software to optimize the hardware, which HANA does. If you move data into the main memory, you will have a factor-of-ten performance improvement. But if you leverage multiple core processors and get the software to spread the work efficiently, you see more drastic improvements in speed."

Despite the optimism and the fact that SAP now has more than 100 customers using HANA, Bussmann still believes that there is room for improvement with the product.

There is always room for improvement according to Bussmann.

"We also need to scale up our development for new applications and allow the ecosystem to establish itself. These things take time."

In-memory databases pose a real challenge to traditional RDMBs which typically operate by pinning a smaller amount of the index used in queries into real memory. Of course these parameters are tunable on most traditional database systems but the SAP product pins nearly 100% of the searchable index into real memory.

The simple fact of the matter is that it is will take longer to process queries on disk rather than in memory.

As in-memory systems evolve they will eventually replace disk based systems completely.

This represents a huge potential windfall for SAP because they will be able to replace an Oracle license with an SAP HANA license and pocket more of the revenue from the customer.