We're pleased to announce the public availability of SAP HANA, express edition SPS02. It has only been a few months since our previous release, but, we've packed in some serious features into this latest release – thank you for your input and feedback!
One of our goals with SAP HANA, express edition (HXE) was to improve the way that HANA users could interact directly with the HANA development team. In SPS02, we are introducing a "Notification and Feedback" area in the SAP HANA Cockpit.
Notifications are messages pertaining to your installation – for example, availability of a new security patch, or a new release, or warnings about specific issues affecting the software that you are running.
Feedback allows you to send a direct message to the HANA development team. These features are unique to SAP HANA, express edition.
From SPS02 onwards, we enable a
tenant database by default. This was initially excluded as a way to reduce the memory footprint, but, optimizations elsewhere in the product makes it possible to switch on, making it easier to use the data processing engines (graph, spacial, text, PAL)
While we're talking about those data processing engines, we are making the
Automated Predictive Library (APL) available from SPS02, as well as the new
Tensorflow integration features (EML-AFL). This will enhance your ability to develop ML and AI based applications with SAP HANA, express
With a patch on the 1st of September, SAP HANA Smart Data Integration is also available as an optional installation to make it easier to load data into SAP HANA, express edition.
We've further enhanced our platform and installation features to include a
Console Mode for the Download Manager component – the software which is downloaded directly after registering for SAP HANA, express edition. This would allow you to directly download HXE onto a cloud based Linux host without a desktop GUI, or via an SSH link to a Linux machine you might have somewhere in the office. The download manager is also included within the installation (VM, Binary and Cloud), allowing you to start with a minimal install, and add optional components as you need them. We've also added support for the
IBM PowerLinux in the latest release - only for the binary install.
Additionally, we've made a range of
performance improvements (startup time, memory management, text processing enhancements) that will improve the experience for SAP HANA, express edition users. There are a number of enhancements in XSA which further reduces the memory overhead which are worth looking into.
Looking forward, we're also planning to increase our presence on a variety of
public clouds, and we are working on making an official SAP HANA, express edition
container available shortly – all based on the SPS02 edition. We have updated to the version in the Google Cloud Platform, and also the AWS and Azure images provided via the SAP Cloud Appliance Library.
I
mportant links to bookmark:
- SAP HANA, express edition SPS02 can be downloaded from here.
- HXE can be launched directly in the cloud from the Google Cloud Launcher: The database only option can be found here, and the full image, with application server stack and SAP development and administration tools can be found here
- The full image can also be launched via the SAP Cloud Appliance Library - which provides template images for AWS and Azure.
- Be sure to check in to the Launch Page regularly for a number of new tutorials, how-tos and blogs
- Check out Lucia's blog series on developing under the XSA model.
- Also - be sure to review the other new capabilities in SPS02.
As always – thank you for all the contributions on the SAP community, the emails and messages via twitter, linkedIn – please keep them going!
