SAP HANA Cloud Product Updates – January 2021

This quarter’s update of SAP HANA Cloud is now available for all customers. Find out here the main highlights of this release.

SAP HANA Cloud on Alibaba Cloud

Our newest available hyperscaler for SAP HANA Cloud is Alibaba Cloud. From now on, you can create your database and data lake instances using the infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud in China. You can find out more about our data center availability in our Data Center Locations.

SAP Cloud Connector

SAP Cloud Connector is now working with SAP HANA Cloud. This allows you to easily access data located in your SAP HANA on-premise databases, as well as other SAP HANA Cloud database instances from SAP HANA Cloud to create hybrid cloud deployments and extend workloads to SAP HANA Cloud.

Learn more about SAP Cloud Connector and check out the blog post by Laura Nevin.

SAP HANA Machine Learning Updates

The Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud are being enhanced this quarter with the following functionality:

• Enhanced unified regression function
  • Reason code support for local interpretability for of non-tree-based algorithms and support for more model evaluation statistics
  • Improved model evaluation insights and ML explainability with regression model prediction
• New functionality: attention for time series predictions
  • Trending Deep Learning algorithm for non-linear and complex time series (LSTM*, ATTENTION). It allows for more efficient and faster training, smaller models, less training data, better interpretable model. An example use case is non-linear system behavior prediction.
  • ARIMA categorical feature column support and support of implicit bayesian encoding of categorial data with ARIMA forecasts. It allows building simpler and faster ARIMA forecasts without the need for pre-encoding categorial data.

Learn more:

• SAP HANA Automated Predictive Library (APL)
• SAP HANA Cloud Predictive Analysis Library (PAL)

SAP HANA Database Explorer Updates

SAP HANA Database Explorer has received two important updates, which include:

• Ability to filter and group database connections, providing a way to quickly locate a database connection and organize databases into folders or groups.
• New import and export functionality, which allows importing Esri shapefiles, includes a new export data wizard to export to Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and Alibaba Cloud OSS. You can also now import two new data formats: Parquet and Binary data.

Learn more:

• What’s New for SAP HANA Database Explorer
• Get Started with the SAP HANA Database Explorer

SAP HANA Client Updates

SAP HANA Client has the following updates:

• The client driver for Node.js now uses a binary interface enabling for Long Term Support (LTS) and feature versions of Node.js. As an example, Node.js 14 and Node.js 15 can now be used with SAP HANA Client.
• There is a new 32-bit client driver for Python on Microsoft Windows.
• It now includes the ability to send trace information to stdout and stderr.
• It provides easier access to trace information in cloud environments, in which access to the file system may be limited.

Learn more:

• What’s New in the SAP HANA Client
• Use Clients to Query an SAP HANA Database

SQL Analyzer

The SQL Analyzer is a new feature of SAP HANA Cloud that helps you improve the performance of SQL queries by seeing a detailed analysis of their performance.

Learn more: Analyze Statement Performance

Configuring your disk storage and buffer cache size

• Possibility of provisioning disk space separately from memory
• Allows users to utilize the Native Storage Extension for larger disk-based scenarios
• Increases flexibility in terms of cost-aware data storage

You can use the Cloud Foundry API to change the configuration of the assigned disk storage:

cf update-service <instance name> -c ‘{“data”:{“storage”:<new size>}}’

Learn more about the SAP HANA Native Extension Storage

SAP Business Application Studio with SAP HANA features

SAP Business Application Studio is a new SAP Cloud Platform service in SAP Cloud Foundry which offers a modular development environment for efficient development of business applications.

It is the successor of SAP Web IDE, and now offers SAP HANA native development tools, extensions, and technologies for creating database artifacts. SAP Business Application Studio is built on industry-leading open source.

Learn more:

• Development in SAP HANA Cloud
• SAP HANA Cloud Modeling Guide
• SAP HANA Cloud Developer Guide for Cloud Foundry Multitarget Applications

SAP HANA Cloud Document Store

The SAP HANA Cloud Document Store is a dedicated, but fully integrated binary store in SAP HANA Cloud providing all core database capabilities. It also stores any valid JSON data without first declaring its structure. The Document Store supports native operations on JSON documents while providing a seamless SQL integration, and can be enabled/disabled in the HANA Cloud instance at any time.

Learn more: SAP HANA Cloud JSON Document Store Guide and Spotlight: SAP HANA Cloud JSON Document Store

For more information about these highlights, please join our webinar with experts: Register / Watch Now

Want to try out SAP HANA Cloud for yourself? Sign-up for trial today!