What is New in SAP HANA SPS12

SAP HANA SPS 12 is now available for download.  With this release, we continue our commitment to enhance existing capabilities and add new ones to simplify IT, innovate modern applications, and accelerate insights.  SAP HANA is a mature enterprise solution. Our customers have adopted the SAP HANA platform as the digital core to run mission critical business processes.  They are also maximizing the value of SAP HANA and gaining competitive advantage by building modern, custom applications that unlock new insights. The variety of use cases implemented by customers is a testament to SAP HANA as a unified platform to support your applications.

With this release, management of your IT landscape is further simplified.  We’ve taken an already rock solid platform and further hardened security, enhanced availability, unified the development and administration experience, and expanded advanced analytic capabilities.  Let’s take a closer look.

Simplify IT:

IT simplification is critical for digital enterprises.  SPS12 introduces a way to simplify implementing change with the ability to capture workloads and replay them on target systems to simulate real workloads and compare statement runtimes.  Target systems can be on different versions of SAP HANA enabling one to replay workloads on a newer version and see how applications will continue to function with changes to the environment.   This reduces time and cost when implementing change.

Moreover, workload management now has the ability to easily enable/disable workload classes when you want to lift workload constraints temporarily for specific tasks such as monthly closing.  During cross-tenant scenarios (scenarios that access data from more than one tenant in a multi-tenant landscape) workload management settings in all of the tenants are taken in to consideration when executing a statement.

In addition to workload management enhancements for multi-tenant landscapes, one can now use system replication for near zero downtime tenant clone/move, turn on audit logging for cross-tenant scenarios, and have access to more granular information for monitoring purposes. Additionally, system replication in SAP HANA SPS12 adds more sync/async combinations between first, second, and third replication tiers for greater flexibility when managing system landscapes.  With this capability, it becomes easier to rotate the roles of servers.  This release also extends the choices for the system replication initial data loads.  When network throughput environments are suboptimal. one can now create the initial data load from backup snapshot files.

Furthermore, on the front-end side, the SAP HANA Cockpit, a modern web based administration tool, includes several new configuration and monitoring options.  The SAP HANA Cockpit now supports scheduling all backup jobs (including jobs for 3^rd party tools), monitoring the longest-running threads active in the system for immediate visibility of blocking situations, and additional integration for workload management and security.  Security enhancements also include expanded monitoring, improved authorization troubleshooting, and simplified key management.

Innovate modern applications:

Modern IT is seeking to leverage unique business applications to boost competitive advantage.  In SAP HANA SPS 11, we re-architected the application services to scale independently from database services and supported new runtimes: JavaScript(Node.js), and Java on Apache TomEE/Tomcat. With SPS12, support for standard code management tools, such as Git, GitHub and Maven, expands to include integrated Git/Gerrit for improved workflow of Git approvals and code reviews.  To significantly improve the performance, SAP HANA SPS 12 also introduces the concept of partial runtime download, which allows us to avoid redeploying an entire Java or Node.js runtime upon each service startup.

Usually businesses have huge volumes of text data that contain hidden insights.  To gain more value from text data.  text mining in SAP HANA SPS12 features two major enhancements. First, the previously inaccessible text mining index is now available for data scientists as a system table that can be used as the basis for custom/proprietary algorithms. The text mining index is a data structure that describes the frequency of terms that occur in a collection of reference documents, which is built from the results of text analysis during pre-processing.  Second, text mining features improved precision by leveraging multi-word concepts (i.e. ‘fast food’ or ‘retirement home’) identified by text analysis in 32 languages. These concepts extend the definition of terms that are used by text mining, yielding higher precision.

In the area of spatial processing, the Application Function Library (AFL) SDK now supports spatial data types, which allows building custom spatial algorithms.  Spatial operations depend on reference systems, e.g. planar Euclidian space or a round earth. SPS12 now supports automatic import of common reference systems (i.e. SRS and UOM) which simplifies configuration.  Moreover, geocoding (i.e. address to latitude/longitude) is now natively available in SAP HANA as part of smart data quality.  Finally, integration with 3rd party geospatial tools such as GeoTools (geoserver, uDig, e.t.c.), ESRI ArcGIS, and Hexagon Geo-spatial, are now supported to drive continued openness.

SAP HANA graph data processing is now generally available, providing the processing capabilities help customers extract deeper insights from hyper-connected data and their relationships. SAP HANA includes a graph engine with built-in graph algorithms (neighborhood search, shortest path, strongly connected components, pattern matching) to find connections without manually creating complex JOIN statements. It also introduces a Property Graph model with flexible schema, which enables users to traverse relationships without the need for predefined modeling.  It also comes with a graph viewer tool (for quick visualization and dynamic interaction (i.e. change algorithm parameters) with graph data real-time, and a graph modeler tool that is (integrated with SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA to create and consume graphs visually instead of via SQL or SQLScript.

From a tooling perspective, the SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA has added cross-object impact analysis (to identify the impact of a change in a lower-layer source object and evaluate the impact of that change on referenced object) and lineage analysis (to follow the source path of data up to the object of interest).  Both the SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA and SAP PowerDesigner now supports core data services (CDS) artifacts.

Accelerate Insights:

Transforming data to information or insights is the key step to achieving digital transformation.  SAP HANA smart data Integration (SDI) continues enhancing adapters to handle more scenarios.  It now supports new sources such as: Google+, Informix, E-mail (.pst) file. These new adapters allow customers to access data from a broader range of of systems.

Moreover, the adapters for OData and Hadoop HDFS (.csv) have been enhanced so support read/write scenarios. Beyond adapter enhancements, SAP HANA smart data integration also enhanced new operational capabilities, such as scheduling or starting tasks immediately, processing remote subscription exceptions and creating, altering and dropping agents. Its ability to start, pause, resume and stop real time replication is also critical.

SAP HANA smart data integration also supports data masking during ETL processes, which obfuscates and masks personally identifiable information while retaining data relationships and relevancy. It helps customers comply with data privacy and protection policies.

Additionally, in SPS12, SAP HANA smart data access (SDA) adds Kerberos-constrained delegation support for authentication for HANA-to-HANA scenarios enhancing end user experience.  SDA also allows updating a record that already exists, or inserting a new record on the remote sources HANA-to-HANA, IQ, and Teradata.