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Sap Hana Afl
Sap Hana Afl
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Pre-delivered commonly utilized business, predictive and other types of algorithms for
use in projects or solutions that run on SAP HANA.
These algorithms can be leveraged directly in development projects, speeding up
projects by avoiding writing custom complex algorithms from scratch.
Written in C++
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Benefits of AFL:
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Increasing performance is the main goal:
We can dramatically increase performance by executing complex computations in the
database instead of at the application sever level. SAP HANA provides several techniques to
move application logic into the database, and one of the most important is the use of
application functions.
Application functions are like database procedures written in C++ and called from outside to
perform data intensive and complex operations.
Currently, PAL and BFL are delivered in one archive (that is, one SAR file with the name
AFL.SAR). The AFL archive is not part of the HANA appliance, and must be installed separately
by the administrator.
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What is Predictive Analysis Library (PAL)?
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PAL is available on every HANA license option as well as HANA Cloud
Platform.
PAL defines functions that can be called from within SQLScript procedures.
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Why do we need PAL?
Many of the standard algorithms used in data mining and predictive analysis would
be too difficult or even impossible to implement yourself in SQLScript.
On the other hand, if you want to perform real-time predictive analysis, you need
to avoid exporting your data to an external application server to run the predictive
analysis function. That's where PAL comes in.
The idea behind PAL is to make it very straightforward to execute. For example, a
clustering calculation (like K-means) on your data can be implemented in SAP
HANA with just a few lines of SQLScript.
In most cases, the steps to use PAL are
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Algorithms supported by PAL:
The algorithms in PAL are carefully selected based on the following criteria:
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Associations When this happens, what else happens
Time Series In the last few years sales are falling but at this time of year we still
expect to sell X amount
Outlier Detection These sports fans are not behaving like the rest of their group
Weighted Scoring vendors who delivery late get a big penalty and a lesser penalty
for wrong pricing
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