Late last year I wrote a small paper (for my MBA program) and developed an accompanying proof of concept (Javascript/Node/P2P) on the implementation of blockchain in the retail or food distribution network around protecting goods from food fraud.
Food fraud is a crime which has the
potential to negatively affect the brand image, financial resources and impact
multiple parties in the supply chain paradigm of food distribution. The ability
to track and trace the origin and touch points of products throughout the
network is imperative to limit the impact caused by a food fraud incident or a
food safety issue. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt multiple industries
by providing a shared and trusted ledger of transactions which no single
company controls. One practical application of blockchain is utilizing the
platform as a static register – a distributed database for storing reference
data. In this paper I will describe a technical implementation of a blockchain
in a practical scenario which shares the details and a proof of concept of a
food origin scenario. The implementation will share a simplistic JavaScript application
of a digital ledger based blockchain allowing manufacturers to register data on
the food origin in the static registry and vested parties the ability to augment
and view the data for the purpose of traceability and accuracy.read more
Rasa is an open source machine learning framework to automate text-and voice-based conversations.
Rasa UI is a web application built on top of, and for Rasa. Rasa UI provides a web application to quickly and easily be able to create and manage bots, NLU components (Regex, Examples, Entities, Intents, etc.) and Core components (Stories, Actions, Responses, etc.) through a web interface. It also provides some convenience features for Rasa, like training and loading your models, monitoring usage or viewing logs.
I developed Rasa UI to help me manage my bots as well as creating and managing the training data. The app is developed on NodeJS, and uses a simple SQLite DB for persistence (previously PostgresDB). read more
During a recent small migration project from a HCP MaxDB DB to a HCP HANA DB I needed to import multiple CSV files, and go through a series of dry runs during the process. Since I was going to be doing the loads multiple times, I decided it would be helpful to write a small front end to make the processes of uploading failrly large CSV files into HANA simpler.
Over the past few months I have heard the question: “Whats the best way to get data into HANA from CSV?” While there are a few options if you have a HANA appliance and system level access to the system, there are not too many options with a HCP instance. After trying/testing the CSV import from Studio (size limit), a hdbti file (not great for multiple/repetitive options/file size challenges) it does not leave you with too many choices. After doing some digging it seems quite a few people have uploaded data through a server side script (XSJS) successfully and using the BATCH option while processing is pretty fast.read more
A couple of weeks ago I was moving code from 1 hana instance to another trying to keep them in sync. However, I thought there might be a better alternative for comparing the contents of the repos across my systems to ensure that the files matched. After doing some digging and not finding a solution, I decided to write a small tool to do just this, called Syscompare. It is a open source HANA app which uses the new File API and compares the files on each system and displays the differences.
You can read more about the application here, and find the files for the HANA app in Github.
Features:
– Compare repos across HANA instances
– Display file differences in the applicationread more
This was nice to see – at the 2014 SAP TechEd event I was welcomed with this poster of myself 🙂 I was not aware of the nomination, but was really pleased to be recognized as a part of a prestigious and talented group of folks who are dedicated to helping the SAP community.
Over the last few months, working on the metric² open source project, I have been frequently updating the GitHub repo. As a heavy XS Web IDE user, this entailed exporting or copying the contents of the files from the package into my local GitHub repository for the project and subsequently committing the files from there. Since there is a small disconnect between the source (my HANA packages) and the destination (GitHub) I like to often see what changes which are due to be committed, the differences between the files, or just compare the files between the 2 systems.
Being over dedicated to building solutions to some of my workflow challenges (see here, here and here), I created yet another small HANA native app called Git <> HANA. The application allows you to compare files between your local HANA package and your (or any other) GitHub repo, and it also lets you commit files directly from the UI to GitHub, and vice-versa. If a file does not exists, it will create it for you (on either side). There are a couple other cool features which you can read about below, or watch the little video I created.read more
After releasing metric² at TechEd Las Vegas last year it has had well over a hundred downloads, and has a couple loyal followers always offering advice and feedback (which I am truly thankful for). Last week we released version 2.0 of the free and open source app and subsequently put it onto GitHub under the MIT license which you can find here.
The biggest changes of the new version of metric² include:
A new UI (Twitter bootstrap based)
The ability for users to create their own account
A few new metrics
No longer uses SAPUI5 (a blog post in itself!)
The biggest change was the front-end/UI and the code has been refactored and split up into multiple library files (XSJSLib) and is simplified for easier reading.
The primary goal of the app is, and always has been to try and visualize your big data. Along with providing a self service tool to monitor and provide insights on the data you have in, and around your HANA system, while using it to the fullest.
Short Survey
I am in the process of trying to understand where to take the app in terms of use and direction and if you are interested in helping guide the discussion, if you have downloaded, used or seen the app I would greatly appreciate if you took 1 minute to complete a short 5 question, multiple choice survey here.read more
I was recently working on developing a couple of XSOData services for Metric² when I realized that it would be pretty helpful to have a way to develop, test, explore services and queries. I wrote a similar tool for SAP Netweaver Gateway and the iPad a couple years ago, and decided to model it with some similarities, but having the ability to build it directly into HANA using XS, would add some nice integration benefits.
This is what we will be developing in this blog ….
Over the past few years Node.js has really caught my attention. The simplicity of Javascript with server side processing, Non-blocking-IO, Event Driven, and simple integration always intrigued me as a great combination for enterprise applications. (Somehow it sounds similar to HANA XS Engine 😉 )
A couple months ago I ran into a similar problem to Jon-Paul Boyd (HANA Forum Post) in which I wanted to use XS Engine for websocket/persistant connections to my HANA Instance, but due to the support not being included in SPS6, I decided to look elsewhere, and ended up using Node.js to fulfill this requirement.
In the past, while developing HANA/Node apps, I resorted to creating a XSJS App which really just acted as a middleware layer to push and pull data from my HANA DB, until recently I noticed a great blog post from Ingo Sauerzapf which piqued my interest. The blog mentioned that Holger Koser had created a HANA DB Client for Nodemaking life extremely easy to connect to HANA directly from Node. I thought it would be good share the small project I developed using Node.js and this new client with the community in the hopes that others will share their experiences with the technology.
This blog is not necessarily an introduction to Node.js development as there are some nice tutorials and examples out there from Tobias Hoffman and Alessandro Spadoni. The blog is intended to cover a small app developed in Node.js and shows the development process behind it, taking it from conception through to reality. I encourage you to download a few of these components, and also the example out. This app, similar to another app I developed called Metric²(which you can read about here), it is a web based widget showing some friendly KPI’s on the performance of your HANA Instance. The app gets streaming data from our HANA backend displaying this in a friendly, simple dashboard. The dashboard is designed to be shown on a large format monitor in a Ops or IT center and can also very easily be modified to show any KPI’s relevant to your business or needs.
Requirements:
SAP HANA Instance (e.g. AWS Developer Image)
Node.js installed (this does not need to be on the HANA box but same network with access to the HANA port – normally 30015).
Node Dependencies
We will also use a couple of helpful dependencies from the node community including Socket.io, Express and obviously hdb. Installing these packages is as simple as running “npm install hdb”. Once you have the dependencies installed we can start creating our app.
App Design
For me, I always start mocking up in my favorite Image IDE (Photoshop), I used this image as inspiration for my app. I liked the simplicity, clean layout with focus on the numbers at the bottom. In our case, we will add a small chart in the center, giving us a basic visual representation of the numbers being displayed:
In this case I decided to use Twitter Bootstrap to help with some of the layout/formatting of the page as well as some mundane tasks like Modal popups. From a coding perspective I started out developing the Single paged “index.html” file, doing my best to stick with my mockup which I previously created. I was sure to “id” all of my elements on this page as we will be updating these values from our node.js backend. This aspect of node development is strictly “traditional” web based development. No need to work with Node or any server for that matter. Once you have your page rendering the way you want, we can move on.
Metric² is a web based, realtime dashboarding platform for SAP HANA, on SAP HANA.I recently gave a demo of the app at Demojam in Las Vegas (You can read my blog post about the event here). Metric² is a free app/download and this blog gives some insight into how it works, and how you can download and install it in your own HANA system:
Overview
Metric² is made up of 3 key areas:
Dashboards: Metric² can have multiple dashboards. Dashboards are designed as blank canvases, are quite flexible, and can contain widgets which are added can be simply dragged and dropped into their needed locations and also sized accordingly.
Widgets: Dashboards can have multiple widgets displayed. There are a variety of widgets including a range of predefined datasources (CPU, Memory, Disk etc.) but also include custom widgets (SQL, JSON, Yahoo) which can display a myriad of information to your team.read more
