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SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform that is deployable as an on-premises appliance or in the cloud. The platform is best suited for performing real-time analytics and developing and deploying real-time applications.
All SAP HANA database operations (reads, inserts, updates, or deletes) are performed in the main memory of the host, while the data is kept in the RAM of one or multiple SAP HANA worker hosts. This feature differentiates SAP HANA from traditional databases, where only a part of the data is cached in RAM and the remaining data resides on disk. Persistent storage is used to provide a fallback to ensure that the SAP HANA database can be restored to its most recent committed state in the event of failure.