How is SAP HANA used as an Accelerator?

SAP HANA is utilized as an accelerator in different ways. The accelerators based on SAP HANA are kinds of applications that extend SAP Business Suite systems' capabilities via leveraging scalability and performance benefits, provided by SAP HANA. SAP HANA is applied by performing the operations for different computing functions of business reports or processes.

SAP HANA accelerator approach includes replicating the data for operations, which are bottlenecks for operation in the SAP HANA table. A "switch" is set within SAP Business Suite app in order to show that the mentioned tables will be read in SAP HANA by utilizing Secondary Database Connection.

Application Accelerator

Application Accelerator, also known as Suite Accelerator, is basically an app utilizing SAP technologies. It uses ERP (Net Weaver-based system) or SAP R/3 as well as replicating the databased tables in it to SAP HANA, utilizing the trigger-based replication system of SAP, SWT2DB Add-on and SLT. Thereafter, existing data storage functions are pointed away through usual RDBMS as well as by SAP HANA. Effective SQL announcements run 100 to 1000 times quicker in many cases of SAP HANA usage.

Benefits of Application Accelerator

Advantages of the application accelerator will depend heavily on the users since it is highly situation-specific. For instance, you can permit the finance or sales reports to run against the real-time data that gives good pipeline visibility or fast month-end close. Users can achieve the stock replenishment tasks faster, which means you have fewer out of stock items. So, the benefits of application accelerator are endless.

In-Built Examples

There are plenty of scenarios in which SAP is in-built. The Support Site (OSS) of SAP explains the list as following -

- Financial Accounting
- Financial Statements
- Accrual calculation/overhead costing
- Overhead rates
- Material Ledger - Price Analysis, BW Extraction, Virtual InfoProvider and Period End Closing
- Interface material ledger
- Hierarchy processing
- ML drilldown reporting enhancements
- FI-AA interface - SAPDBADA, Enhancements, Reconciliation and SAPLABRA
- Materials management
- FI Line Item Browsers
- Percentage method
- BI reporting through DataSource

Which SAP ERP version is needed in order to run Application Accelerator?

As Application Accelerator is incorporated within the SAP Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP), users have to have updated releases that have been drawn into the SAP Note 1620213. These needs are not burdensome in many cases, especially if you need constant patching schedule. However, you do need SAP ERP 6.0 Unicode system, at least. As per the Support Package Stack or Enhancement Package, you might have code for AA or might have to apply code manually. You should check SAP Note for AA.

In case, you are unable to Unicode or patch, then AA cannot be utilized by you; however, you can still utilize Secondary Database Connection.

Things Required for Application Accelerator

Majorly, there are five additions required by application accelerator -

1. SMT2DB according to SAP Note 1696402
2. Kernel 7.21 (same as 7.20, however it also favors Application Accelerator)
3. SLT - System Landscape Transformation
4. SAP HANA Database Client on source system and SLT
5. DMIS_2010_700 in SLT system and DMIS_2010_XXX in source system