2020 marks 10 years of SAP HANA!  The design principles of SAP HANA captured a lot of attention within the database industry.  SAP HANA was the first data platform to deliver real-time analytics on live transactions. As an in-memory, columnar database, SAP HANA could highly compress data and store it in RAM instead of hard disk for faster access to data in multicore CPUs.  Memory reads were many times faster than conventional database systems. Transactional systems no longer had to be separated from analytical systems in data warehouses, so data was real-time and up-to-date.

As we celebrate SAP HANA’s 10th birthday, it is amazing to see the explosive growth of the product over this time – with over 32,000 customers, many industry accolades, and its strategic use in so many major enterprise organizations around the world.

The commitment to our design principles continues, as we offer an enhanced user experience, increase scale and data reliability, enable acceleration to the cloud, and continue to lower the total cost of ownership with the release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05.  In addition, the recently announced long term support commitment to HANA 2.0 SPS 05 is a clear message to our customers that they can feel confident in their planning and adoption of this latest version.

Here are just some of the many new features you’ll find in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05:

• Tiered storage with scale-up and support for scale out
• External key server enablement
• Increased usability and administration capabilities
• Hybrid extensions to the cloud
• Enhancing the developer experience
• Advancing analytical processing of spatial and graph data
• Further enabling predictive and machine learning

Tiered storage with scale-up and support for scale out

The SAP HANA native storage extension multi-temperature storage option allows you to increase SAP HANA’s data capacity at a low total cost of ownership (TCO).  The native storage extension provides a simple, scalable data tiering option for most data types and workloads.  Administrators can optimize data placement to achieve an optimal cost and performance ratio to support their business priorities with more cost effectiveness.  Initially launched with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04, the native storage extension now offers full support for scale out as well as scale up systems.  In addition, the extension now also supports HASH-RANGE and RANGE-HASH partitioning schemes for customers using HASH partitioning to manage table growth.

External key server enablement

SAP HANA provides comprehensive encryption, including that all data at rest (data volumes, redo log volumes, and backups) can be securely encrypted. As of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 it is now possible to use a key server to control access to the HANA data encryption keys. SAP HANA local secure store is leveraged to connect to SAP Data Custodian key management service as the first supported key server. Others are planned to follow later. With SAP Data Custodian key management service, a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliant key vault is used to secure your customer controlled keys.

Increased usability and administration capabilities

We continue to invest to make SAP HANA features more easily consumable by our customers.  Many system replication features are enabled through SAP HANA cockpit including multi-target replication, secondary time travel, and invisible takeover with handshake.  In addition, SAP HANA Cockpit introduces a persistent memory monitor, a configuration editor for the native storage extension buffer cache, the ability to apply alert definitions across multiple databases, visual threshold indicators for performance metrics, and the ability to switch to any database when working on any application.  Secure setup is more easily enabled through the use of new wizards to quickly apply a basic configuration for audit policies and user groups.

For analyzing performance, the SAP hardware and cloud measurement tool allows you to analyze and confirm proper infrastructure for SAP HANA Systems.  In addition, our capture and replay tool now includes SELECT FOR UPDATE results in the replay report rather than skipping the execution of the statement.

This release will also include a web user interface for HANA smart data integration remote data provisioning agent management which allows you to perform a number of data provisioning agent management functions without accessing the operating system.  Users can access the new HANA smart data integration data assurance adapter metadata through virtual table and procedures and run data assurance jobs through the administration and monitoring user interface, and this tooling will be integrated into SAP HANA cockpit.

Hybrid Extensions to the cloud

In the context of the newly released SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 now supports hybrid scenarios with database tunneling between SAP HANA Cloud and SAP HANA on premise.  Customers can extend workloads or processes utilizing SAP HANA Cloud as a gateway to data in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA data lake as well as other cloud data such as AWS Athena and Google BigQuery.  Real-time replication is supported for replicating data from on-premise systems to the cloud using transaction logs to offer a more optimized method of replication.   In addition, SAP HANA now comes with an extension allowing customers to write compressed and encrypted backups to and restore directly from AWS S3.  With this, customers can run hybrid scenarios to easily extend their on-premise deployment into the cloud.

Enhancing the developer experience

We have introduced a number of new tools and updated a number of drivers to provide enhancements for our developers. With this release we introduce a SQL statement help panel: a side panel that provides direct help links as well as metadata on tables, views, functions and procedures for a selected SQL statement.  A new graphical role editor was introduced in HANA 2.0 SPS 05 in order to visually manage roles and grant data access rights and privileges.

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 WEBIDE includes support for new drivers for Node.js, SAP UI5 and our SAP HANA client drivers are now available on additional public repositories including npmjs.com and PyPI.

For customers utilizing SAP HANA calculation views, we introduce static cache, which can help reduce runtime and resource consumption and increase performance of relevant queries.  In addition, column encryption information is available during modeling, and you can run a health check procedure to help find performance improvements for existing models.  Developers can leverage a new JAVA API to programmatically create multiple calculation views.

Advancing analytical processing of spatial and graph

We continue to extend the spatial capabilities of SAP HANA,   Spatial reference systems are now built in and part of the SAP HANA delivery (more than 9,000 in total).  You no longer need to import spatial reference systems via the metadata installer.  Spatial reference system 3857 is already pre-installed and other reference systems can easily be installed or activated using built-in function calls.

Spatial indices can provide significant query performance improvements, and we have extended our index support to include Rtree (index for geometries) and Hilbert (index specifically for points). These new indices are optimized for queries with low selectivity (They query small amount of objects from a large data volume).  SAP HANA spatial data can now be leveraged by open source tools such as GeoServer and DBeaver.

For graph data, we have made a number of significant performance improvements for path algorithms, including shortest path one-to-one, shortest path one-to-all, top-k shortest paths.  There are also a number of new GraphScript features.

Further enabling predictive and machine learning

With SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05, we introduce a harmonized interface across all classification and clustering algorithms, including enhanced model debriefing information and pivoted data input support. This will help developers more easily adopt and switch between algorithms of the same category.  In addition, we provide machine learning explainability:  more transparency with classification and regression predictions by providing reason codes explaining individual predictions for tree-based algorithms.  Support for online learning enabled functions, such as Online Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and online linear regression, allows continuous training of models based on updated input data and is important for real-time forecasting scenarios.  This release also provides additional algorithm coverage with the  R and Python machine learning clients for SAP HANA.

These features are just some of what you can expect from SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05, released June 26.  In the series of webinars listed below, you can learn more about the new features and enhancements from the SAP HANA Product Management team: