6.7    Data Lifecycle Management

Managing data well now plays an even more important part because SAP HANA database costs are higher and scalability has limitations as mentioned earlier. In addition, business requirements don’t call for availability of all data for all time periods in the main memory of SAP HANA.

There are three options for data management:

• To minimize data in SAP HANA through archiving, move data to an external store that can serve as an archiving solution such as SAP IQ.
• For certain use cases, the data need not be stored in SAP HANA at all but rather stored in other solutions such as Hadoop and then accessed through SDA into SAP HANA.
• For data in SAP HANA, the options for data management are the following:
  • Data aging: This is a new concept in SAP HANA that governs data through aging via two concepts: data resident time and business rules. While this option is available to several technical objects such as IDocs, application logs, workflows, and so on, few business objects in SAP S/4HANA Finance support this feature. Data aging is achieved through horizontal table partitioning and is used to separate hot data (current) from cold data (old). To understand how the business rules play a part in this partitioning, think of finance documents that are more than three months old but are still open. If the resident time is set to three months for these documents, because the business rule states that the document status can’t be open, these documents can’t be moved to the “cold” area. From a data access perspective, this division is transparent to the user when viewed from an SAP Fiori app, for instance.
  • Dynamic data tiering: This is more relevant for the business warehousing or analytical use cases. Here, data is again divided based on usage into the following:
    • Hot data in memory
    • Warm data stored in/accessed from disk
    • Extended disk-based columnar table

For SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA or SAP S/4HANA, data aging is expected to play an important role as the number of business objects supported gradually increases.