In this chapter, we have taken a look at the different options available to access a SAP HANA instance, from purchasing a license and a machine (very expensive) and accessing an instance on the cloud (relatively expensive), to a trial account offered by SAP (free).

Next, we installed the SAP HANA Studio, the administration and modeling tool used to interact with the SAP HANA server. We looked at the different functions offered by the software, and the parts of the user interface.

Finally, we imported some sample data into our SAP HANA instance. This data will be used throughout the book as a reference for the models we create, and using the Data Preview function in the Studio, we took a first look at the data itself.

In the next chapter, we'll be building our first data model in SAP HANA, an attribute view. This will allow us to gather data from several tables together in one place, creating one virtual table we can then re-use in other developments.