Hana Data Lake (HDL) was launched in April 2020 by SAP as part of its affordable services based in the cloud.

The advantage of the SAP data lake is the capability of tiering data as per priority to an organization. Further, it provides all the advanced and cutting-edge features at par with other cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Service. Most importantly, cost saving is maximized through its excellent data compression facility to the tune of almost 10x.

An SAP data lake, in keeping with the nature of data lakes, can store both unstructured and structured data that can be enabled in a new HANA Cloud instance or an already existing one. In both cases, the storage resources are flexible and can be added whenever required. Other innovative capabilities of the SAP data lake are high security and safety made possible by end-to-end encryption, monitoring data access, and audit logging.

The Architecture of the SAP Data Lake

The architecture of the SAP data lake is structured like a pyramid.

At the top of the structure is a space where data that is most critical for an organization is stored and which is frequently accessed. This data is operationally most valuable and is the costliest to store in the SAP data lake.

In the middle of the pyramid is the data that, in traditional data repositories, would be typically treated as cold storage. But with an SAP data lake, this perception has radically changed. Now, this relational database structure optimizes the simplification and speed of data analysis, making sure that users can quickly access this massive volume of data whenever required.

At the base of the pyramid is the raw data which is rarely used and which in the past would be deleted from the system to free up storage space. This data cannot be easily accessed but remains a part of the SAP data lake. The advantage is that large volumes of data can be stored at throwaway rates without being deleted.

The gain to businesses from this type of data storage structure is that costs can be kept under control as the option to store data depending on the frequency that it is used can be exercised.

Features of the SAP Data Lake

There are several high-performing features of the SAP data lake that are a big help to organizations. environment.

The first is the SAP IQ technology on which SAP data lake is based and which functions independently of HANA DB. This makes it a flexible data repository that can be scaled to petabytes of data whenever required.

Next, cloud-based SAP data lake provides easy and seamless access to other cloud providers like Amazon Web Service S3 and Google Cloud Platform Cloud Storage.

Users on SAP HANA on-premises systems can be on this SAP data lake cloud platform by choosing HANA Cloud as a hybrid option.