SAP HANA 2 – download your personal copy now!

It’s my pleasure to announce the immediate availability of SAP HANA, express edition 2.0.   (will refer to it as HXE for the rest of this post)

Since the initial introduction of HXE in September, thousands of users have downloaded HXE, interacted with our community experts, and gave us feedback on product features, the newly developed tutorials, and specifically designed content posted by the SAP HANA Academy.

So, what’s new in HXE?     HXE is a variant of the latest HANA release, which is covered by Lori Vanourek in this post.     HXE provides the simplest mechanism to get your hands on HANA 2, and provides you with a free license to use the technology for development or productive workloads, for up to 32 GB or RAM allocated.

The HXE launch page remains the entry point into all things HXE.   Once you’ve registered to download HXE, the updated download manager boasts a few more options to make life simpler.   We’ve included the HANA database client and the XS client directly from the download manager – so, no more searching around SCN for additional downloads!

The Virtual Appliance includes the latest required update for SLES.   A range of options or configurations that had to be done manually is now done out of the box – for example, the predictive functions are now ready to use without running any additional commands.

The Binary Installation method has been simplified significantly, with a single command to install HXE directly onto your Linux box, whether it be a laptop, server or in your favorite cloud provider.

Over and above the features now available for HANA 2, a brand new feature introduced in HXE is the Telemetry functionality, a configurable option to send anonymized, non-private usage data to SAP to improve the HANA product.    I’ll follow this post up with a detailed description of the implementation in the coming days.

My favorite “feature”, though, is the content in the community.   The Q&A forums are critical for getting first time users up and running. The tutorials and how to guides provide users with an efficient way to learn SAP HANA.

Then, The SAP Community blogs and contributions from HXE users, the SAP Mentors (@SAPMentors) and HANA Distinguished engineers (@SAPHDE) showcases project examples, short guides or getting started content by users of the product..

While it’s impossible to list all of them, I’ve picked a few posts by community members I suggest following, in no order of preference:

We invite you to access the launch page, and build your first SAP HANA 2 application!