Towards scalable real-time analytics

We present an overview of our work on the SAP HANA Scale-out Extension, a novel distributed database architecture designed to support large scale analytics over real-time data. This platform permits high performance OLAP with massive scale-out capabilities, while concurrently allowing OLTP workloads. This dual capability enables analytics over real-time changing data and allows fine grained user-specified service level agreements (SLAs) on data freshness. We advocate the decoupling of core database components such as query processing, concurrency control, and persistence, a design choice made possible by advances in high-throughput low-latency networks and storage devices. We provide full ACID guarantees and build on a logical timestamp mechanism to provide MVCC-based snapshot isolation, while not requiring synchronous updates of replicas. Instead, we use asynchronous update propagation guaranteeing consistency with timestamp validation. We provide a view into the design and development of a large scale data management platform for real-time analytics, driven by the needs of modern enterprise customers.