What’s new in SAP HANA SPS11

SAP HANA SPS 11 is now available and comes with new capabilities to innovate modern applications, accelerate insights, and simplify IT. Customers continue to select SAP HANA to run mission critical applications and create next-generation applications that converge transactional, analytical, predictive and streaming data processing. Now, SAP HANA SPS 11 allows you to innovate even faster by leveraging micro services architectures through a broaden choice of programming languages. And you can also transparently accelerate insights on any kind of data – including geospatial and data streams – from any source. With SAP HANA SPS 11, we also renew our commitment to simplifying your IT landscape by delivering a rock solid platform with hardened security, enhanced availability and unified administration for both cloud and on-premise deployments. This marks the tenth SAP HANA support package stack of new features, enhancements and innovations released on a half yearly release cycle after the initial GA of SAP HANA in November 2010.

Innovate modern applications:

In SAP HANA SPS 11, SAP HANA application services (web server) have been re-architected to scale independently from database services so that you can scale applications using fewer resources. Other major enhancements in application services are the support for new programming languages – JavaScript on Node.Js, Java on Apache TomEE, C++ runtime – and the availability of standard code management tools – Git, GitHub and Maven. These enhancements facilitate the creation of applications based on a microservices architecture, where separate components might use different programming languages. Also, user authentication management has been enhanced to allow you to use the same user authentication information for applications and database connections. This unified security management, which is achieved using internal user tokens, improves the overall security and reduces management.

We know that next generation applications, such as IoT, converge transactional, analytical, predictive and streaming data processing. To address these needs, in SAP HANA SPS 11 we have extended the number of pre-packaged predictive algorithms to 70+. Some of these new algorithms can run on live streaming data and they can self-improve, using machine learning techniques. For example, you can use these algorithms for online marketing or in retail scenarios to recommend products. Once deployed, these algorithms can refine their recommendations based on the choices consumers makes in real-time. In SAP HANA SPS 11 we have also extended some of the predictive algorithms to work with spatial and series data in addition to structured and text data.

In many situations, combining machine data from the plant floor with core business processes can significantly improve operational efficiency. With SAP HANA SPS 11 you can now leverage the new SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) adapter and the SAP Plant Connectivity (PCo) adapter to easily process machine data.

In the area of geospatial processing, we have added spatial partitioning across multiple nodes to accelerate spatial analysis and we have also completed the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) certification. This means that third party spatial solutions can exchange insights with SAP HANA and leverage the SAP HANA in-memory spatial engine for storage and analysis.

Text analytics and text mining are further enhanced in SAP HANA SPS 11 with several new capabilities such as the ability to identify relationships among elements of a sentence, on-demand text analysis using XS engine APIs, row-level language identification using language column, full linguistic analysis support for Hungarian and Romanian, improved core extraction for Korean, and improved sentiment analysis for English and German.

SAP HANA SPS 11 also delivers several enhancements to development tools and data modeling, to simplify application development and accelerate application performance. These include a new “where-used list” functionality to find object dependencies, enhancements to SQL scripts, and enhancements SAP HANA calculation views to SAP PowerDesigner.

Accelerate Insights:

SAP HANA SPS 11, can transparently mange large data volumes by moving data across memory, disk, and Hadoop/SAP IQ with the Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) tool. This allows you to gain total visibility from data across your organization and optimize price-performance considerations.

To speed-up Hadoop data analysis, SAP HANA SPS 11 includes a new SAP HANA Vora connector. SAP HANA Vora is the new in-memory query engine for Apache Spark and Hadoop that adds business context to analysis by combining enterprise and Hadoop data.

In the area of data integration, SAP HANA SPS 11 delivers new adapters to replicate or perform bulk data loads from SAP Business Suite DataSources (BW Extractors), SAP Business Suite on SAP ASE, Microsoft Excel, and SOAP Web Services. To facilitate data discovery, the new Enterprise Semantic Services available in SAP HANA SPS 11 helps developers, and business users search SAP HANA database tables and remote sources to identify relevant business content. These services use metadata, semantic information, and table contents to build knowledge graphs that answer users’ search requests.

In SAP HANA SPS 11, Smart Data quality adds survivorship rules for data cleansing and reverse geocoding capabilities for data enrichment. Survivorship rules use multiple data records to create a new one, based on predefined custom rules, such as creation date, completeness of the data and source of the data. Reverse geocoding helps to identify all addresses in given radius from the geolocation.

 Simplify IT:

SAP HANA is an ideal platform to run mission-critical applications and simplify IT landscape with its built-in application services, advanced data processing and data integration and quality services.

SAP HANA SPS 11 comes with several high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, to further strengthen the platform and deliver business continuity. The new Hot Standby functionality helps you regain faster access to data after a data center failure, by enabling applications to fail-over to a fully up-to-date standby database. The primary and the standby databases as kept synchronized by continuously replaying logs.

Additional capabilities in SAP HANA SPS 11 can help you shorten the database recovery time even further. For example, you can now analyze database logs and parameters while the database is down, restart the database recovery from the point of failure, rather than from the beginning, and perform parallel backup and recovery.

In the area of security, SAP HANA SPS 11 delivers built-in SQL injection prevention functions to prevent malicious SQL code execution, and a new security dashboard in SAP HANA Cockpit to give you complete visibility into security KPIs.

For your SAP landscapes, integration with SAP Solution Manager – Early Watch Alerts and SAP Security Baseline – simplifies the monitoring of security breaches and the implementation of default security policies across all SAP systems.

In SAP HANA SPS 11, SAP HANA database administration has been further simplified. For example, you can automatically partition rapidly growing tables using dynamic range partitioning and achieve optimal resource utilization for data loads and transformations, by allocating system resources (CPU threads and memory) to individual processes.

On the tools front, SAP HANA Cockpit, a modern web based administration tool, supports delta backup, database start, stop & restart, analysis of diagnostic files, log analysis when the system is down, and the troubleshooting during scheduled or unscheduled system maintenance.

SAP HANA Cockpit also includes enhanced administration capabilities for Dynamic Tiering, Smart Data Access, Remote Data Sync and the SAP ASE accelerator. SAP HANA Database Control Center, a tool designed to streamline management of multiple SAP HANA systems, comes with enhanced installation capabilities and centralized configuration management.

Openness is a key theme of SAP HANA. You can expand your hardware choices as IBM Power Systems include support for SAP Business Suite applications, SAP Business Warehouse scale-out features, and virtualization of SAP HANA production instances for more flexible deployment options.

Additionally, the SAP HANA certification program has been expanded to include synchronous storage mirroring tools, Smart Data Integration/Smart Data Access adapters and additional database backup and recovery tools.