SAP Hana and BI

https://blogs.saphana.com/2015/09/08/realtime-business-intelligence-hana/
There are currently two kinds of statements circulating when it comes to Business Intelligence:

1. Thanks to HANA all BI queries can be executed on the operational system – no ETL needed
2. HANA is the perfect Data Warehouse database for BI.

The reason operational reports moved into the Data Warehouse 15 years ago was because of better response times there, at the expense of having a second database and data being a day old.

Thanks to S/4HANA or generally speaking, the ability of HANA to run OLTP transactions and OLAP queries simultaneously, this is no longer needed. Or in other words, if the term “Business Intelligence” is used as synonym for “Operational Reports” there is no need for a Data Warehouse.

https://blogs.saphana.com/2015/06/29/impact-of-haswell-on-hana/
In S/4HANA we don’t maintain aggregates (totals) any more but calculate them on request on the fly. The “old” predefined aggregates are not so popular any more and the flexibility to aggregate data freely along multiple hierarchies is more important.

I know this is against the common practice of the last 50 years in enterprise systems, but it simplifies everything dramatically. The early adopters of S/4HANA all verify this. Since there are no updates of totals anymore, there is no need for database locks (read data for update) and the data entry transactions can now run in parallel with a huge impact on high-volume systems like physical warehouses, order entry systems etc. All what remains are the database inserts, but here HANA has to use an internal lock, when multiple inserts for the same table occur in parallel.