Performance Tuning with HANA
As of 2026-08-16
HANA performance degradation is the most common post-go-live crisis on SAP analytics projects, and it usually resurfaces as an emergency call, not a scheduled review. A consultant who arrives with an EXPLAIN PLAN, names the root cause among five known failure modes within the first hour, and leaves a quantified remediation roadmap is solving a crisis a generic configuration consultant cannot. This module teaches exactly that: reading HANA execution plans, applying partition pruning, diagnosing scripted calculation view bottlenecks, and producing the performance investigation report a client IT director signs off on.
What you will learn
- Read and interpret an HANA EXPLAIN PLAN to identify high-cost operators, missing partition pruning, and scripted calculation view L-plane execution — producing a prioritised performance finding list from a real client scenario
- Apply partition pruning principles to SQL predicates: rewrite function-wrapped predicates (YEAR(), MONTH(), CAST()) to pruning-safe range predicates and verify pruning in the EXPLAIN PLAN
- Diagnose the five HANA performance failure modes (scripted calculation views / missing partition pruning / large delta stores / star join cardinality explosion / memory eviction under concurrent load) from HANA Cockpit metrics and SQL Plan Cache data
- Produce a performance investigation report: top-10 slow queries with root-cause classification, quantified remediation impact, effort estimates, and a prioritised remediation roadmap
Module overview
HANA performance tuning is the discipline that separates a Datasphere or BW/4HANA deployment a client can operate reliably for ten years from one that degrades under real workload within months of go-live. Every senior SAP analytics consultant must know how to read an EXPLAIN PLAN, understand the HANA storage architecture, apply partition pruning, and diagnose calculation view bottlenecks — because performance problems are the most common reason clients reopen a project after handover and the most common reason day-rate conversations stall.
Prerequisites
- Intermediate hands-on experience on SAP analytics projects
- Review core concepts first: C040, C038, C041
Outcomes
- Interpret an HANA EXPLAIN PLAN and identify the specific operator responsible for a query performance problem
- Rewrite function-wrapped SQL predicates to enable partition pruning and verify the result
- Diagnose HANA performance failure modes from HANA Cockpit and SQL Plan Cache diagnostics
- Produce a performance investigation report that a client IT director can use for remediation prioritisation
Full module available to members. The full module adds: the decision framework · the end-to-end scenario walkthrough · the KPI scorecard · the anti-patterns · the code blocks · the knowledge check · the diagrams.