Until now, we have been looking at how to use data we have in our SAP HANA system. We have seen that tables and their contents can be used in myriad ways to sort, filter and otherwise process data for analysis by users with reporting software.

At the start of the book, we imported some sample data. It was provided in a self-contained archive file of some tables and their data. We've been using this as the basis for our examples since. This data has been useful; there are only a handful of tables, and 10 to 15 lines of information in all. Understanding the tables, the links between them, and checking that our modeling objects work correctly is relatively easy with such a small dataset.

In the real world, of course, especially with SAP HANA, datasets are much larger. Tens or even hundreds of millions of lines of data are not uncommon; they are even the main reasoning behind the SAP HANA product.

The question we need to ask, when we have such huge...