Starting with SAP HANA

SAP has made it quite easy to get started with SAP HANA. You can get a 30 day trial access to a hosted HANA test and evaluation environment here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-28191 

At the same site, there is documentation, starting guides and a plethora of tutorial videos: http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana

Below are high level steps required to get started with a simple example in SAP HANA. First use a data source and Data Services to pull master and transaction data into SAP HANA.  Then create a model and finally expose the model through explorer.  Ok...seems too simple.

And here is the link for developers "The Road to HANA" with great information to get you going: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31723

Happy in-memory computing!
John K. 

Pfizer

I found this reference (http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=998 ) on the Pfizer success story of SOA & MDM by Joe McKendrick in his "SOA's role in master data Management explained" entry from back in November of 2007. Pfizer's efforts have truly been on the leading edge in terms of tackling SOA & MDM concurrently. I had the opportunity to participate in this effort in 2007 and manage the definition of the SOA & MDM intersection (the Data Services Layer) across the customer, product and identity domains. Since then and through seeing other implementations, I came to truly appreciate Pfizer's decision to execute this multi-domain MDM solution on a single MDM Hub on the same infrastructure, and leveraging SOA as the primary enterprise data delivery mechanism. If it was not for my newborn son I might still be in Groton CT.