Category: Technology

Building a Startup – SAP Startup Focus Program

paschmann

I have some fond memories of a television series from the BBC called “A Car is Born” a 15 episode show where the presenter, Mark Evans painstakingly builds a AC Cobra replica. The show highlighted his experiences, trials and tribulations of building something from the ground up.

At TechEd 2014 in Las Vegas I gave a presentation on being a part of the SAP HANA startup program, developing a product, and trying to make an impact in the world of SAP HANA. While its been an interesting ride, I really felt that my 45 minutes up at the podium was really not enough to convey the past 2 years of highs, lows, successes and failures. Since that was the case, I thought I would get back to some blogging about my experiences along the road, hoping that I can inspire, dissuade and educate others about my quest, just like the BBC show. If you are a budding entrepreneur, HANA guru or just wanting to gain some life lessons (at someone else cost), I encourage you to read on, and share your experiences through some of your life journeys. read more

Git HANA – A free, open-source Github client for SAP HANA

paschmann
Git-HANA-Screenshot.jpg

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

Hacking SAP HANA Websockets

paschmann

Disclaimer: This is not a production or documented feature – its also more of a hijack than a hack  🙂 

I have been hoping for the inclusion of Websocket support on the HANA DB platform for a while now, and I was a little disappointed it was not packaged in the SPS08 release. My goal when building apps (or products) is to make use of the core platform its running on as much as possible, I firmly believe that when convincing an IT department, or company, to implement a product or app, the first question is: “How much infrastructure does this need?”. This can often be a deal breaker and why I am such a big proponent of the HANA’s DB + XS App Server integration – it consolidates the requirements into a single investment. Having a Websocket technology built directly in XS can be an additional selling point which developers are starting to expect these days. read more

Open Source Project: Metric² for SAP HANA – v2.0

paschmann

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

2014 Big Data Hackathon – Charlotte

paschmann

A local tech company – Tresata recently sponsored a 24 hour hackathon in Charlotte around big data in the retail space. It was a ton of fun. I think I was the only person who brought along their own monitor, but I was quite prepared 🙂

My experience with statistical analysis, python and Jupyter was quite limited, so I decided to focus my attention on building a mobile focused use case with some big data integration and I ended up winning the innovation award. A pretty cool pair of Google Glasses 🙂

Here is the app I developed and presented:

And here are all my scribbled the notes/commands/datasets from the event:

emacs test.scala

eval-tool test.scala –hdfs –input bsv%/sample/data_with_headers/hackathon_data_headers –output bsv%upc_counts read more

Open Source Project: XSOData Service Browser

paschmann

Introduction

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.

About the App

Some selectable options:

Generated Query: read more