Welcome to HANA 2.0 SPS 02

If you are a consumer of the SAP HANA SQL and System View Reference guide, here are a few highlights about the improvement initiatives since the guide was last published.

It’s a shorter list of improvements this time from the last blog post because 1) it was a much shorter release cycle for us, and 2) we’ve been very busy packing in all the new features.

But before I get to the highlights, here are some…

Handy links for you

Remember, you can switch between different versions of HANA documentation once you are in the SAP Help Portal by fiddling with the Version dropdown located in the top right corner of the window.

• SAP HANA Platform product page
• What’s New in the SQL Grammar
• HANA 2.0 SPS 02 – SAP HANA SQL and System View Reference
• SAP HANA Platform 2.0 SPS 02 Release Note 2460914
• HANA 2.0 SPS 02 – SAP HANA SQLScript Reference

Improvements in this release

New! Links from the SQL-related What’s New topic – Now when you read the SAP HANA SQL and System Views Reference (New and Changed) topic, you’ll find links that takes you to the actual topics so you can go read more. Hope they are helpful, coz it’s tedious to add them…. 🙂

Links from syntax clauses to their descriptions – In huge topics like the ALTER TABLE Statement, you can now click the links up in the BNF-ish grammar at the top to jump down to the clause descriptions.

General improvements – Lots more examples, fixes to existing examples, updated content, clarified wording and corrections based on feedback and documentation bugs we received.

Window Functions – The previous one ginormous topic un-navigable topic covering all windowing functions has been parceled out into standardized, organized topics–essentially one topic per function except where efficiency begged combining them.

We’ve also fixed the broken examples, added examples where there weren’t any, improved wording, and fixed typos and grammar-o’s. It’s not perfect–it will never be perfect–but much improved. Here is the parent topic if you want to take a tour: Window Functions.

New function grouping called Array Functions –  There is only four of them, but previously the array functions were mixed in with Miscellaneous functions, making them hard to spot. After receiving feedback on that, they now have their own category!

Table of Contents scrolling improved: The lengthy list of ALTER SYSTEM statement topics, and monitoring system view topics (they start with M_) made scrolling the table of contents cumbersome – especially if you weren’t looking for topics in these groups.

To improve the scroll factor, we introduced a collapsible grouping for these topics. Expand/contract the grouping to get at the topics, or quickly scroll past the group if you’re looking for something else.

Improvements to BNF grammar for the (now 7!) hierarchy functions: Like, now they are.. hmm.. more accurate.  Here is the link to the parent topic if you want to take a tour:  Hierarchy Functions

That’s it for now, and as always, feedback welcome.