Progress Software has introduced a preview program for a standards-based connectivity solution to deliver fast transactions and analytics for SAP HANA. Called “Progress DataDirect ODBC” for SAP HANA, the connectivity solution will support both high-volume transactional workloads and massive analytics, provide connectivity to virtually any application including all major BI and analytics tools, and meet the demands of low latency, real-time query and analysis with superior throughput and CPU efficiency.
“DataDirect has over 2 decades of history in terms of building the best implementation of standardized data access,” said Dion Picco, senior director of product management at Progress. “We’ve really helped companies connect their core applications, BI applications, ETL and data integration applications, homegrown or other applications to a variety of data sources.”
As companies start to integrate with enterprise applications, they have security and performance requirements that they might not get out of the box with HANA. That’s where the new solution can help, Picco said.
“We have become a real great solution for them because we offer a complete enterprise quality of service type of product,” Picco said. “Up to 70% of the data communication between an application and a database can be really locked up in that database middleware and that’s what we found and that’s what we optimized for years now,” Picco said. “We plan to bring that same benefit to SAP HANA users.”
This new solution will help expand SAP HANA’s use throughout enterprises by allowing support for fast performance and integration for an assortment of tools, Picco explained. “It really follows on the core values of SAP HANA as the most optimized database middleware technology,” Picco said.
The solution has been in beta for a month, launching alongside Progress’ new Cassandra and SparkSQL products. Feedback has been constructive, Picco said, with more than 130 companies signing up for early access.
“Folks are using it, they are trying out their applications, and they are seeing performance improvements,” Picco said. “Like any beta product, there have seen a few installer issues but that will be fixed easily enough. It’s been a great process for us so far.”
The new product is expected to have an early summer release, according to Picco. “It really brings a certain level of harmony and cohesiveness to all of the different data sources that [enterprises] need to access,” Picco said. “Because we locally cache data we don’t have to hop across the wire. We can optimize protocols and there’s a lot of special software under the hood.”
For more information about the product or to participate in the beta, go here.