You now have a general idea of what makes SAP HANA different from traditional database systems. SAP HANA is a complete system: a massively-parallel, column-oriented, in-memory database appliance, offering several technological differences to other database systems in order to give superior performance over a number of use cases.

There are several other functions offered by SAP HANA, such as complex data models handled natively, an integrated development environment, and other features. These make the system a complete, integrated option allowing businesses to rethink their database management, and allowing users faster access to their data, and ultimately allowing them to spend their time analyzing the data, not waiting for it.

In the next chapter, we'll be taking a closer look at the SAP HANA development environment, the SAP HANA Studio. This is an Eclipse-based tool giving access to all aspects of the SAP HANA appliance.