The Journey Continues with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06

Time flies, when you’re on a mission — a mission to enter the next decade of customer success with SAP HANA! After having released SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 in 2020 with a 5-year maintenance window as well as achieving incredible customer adoption, and exceeding our quality and stability goals, we have been focused on developing the next set of exciting features and enhancements in our upcoming new version – SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06. This new SAP HANA version is now generally available as of December 3, 2021, and will have a 2-year maintenance window.

With the release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, we are delivering impactful new features to further reduce total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) as well as continue to enhance security and administration capabilities for improved database operations efficiency and flexibility.

We continue to invest into extending our already robust back-up & recovery capabilities. With SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, we now offer full back-up compression inclusive of log files and catalog data. This also includes the ability to park a back-up file in a staging area and run repeated point-in-time recoveries. Back-ups and many other administrator tasks can be scheduled via a system-wide scheduler, that even works across multiple tenants in a Multi-tenant Database Container (MDC) configuration. These back-up & recovery enhancements provide for lower TCO, more options, and easier administration.

In addition, as we see increasingly diverse workloads on our customers’ SAP HANA landscapes, we have continued to improve the native workload management functionality. In SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, customers can now set up workload class hierarchies with integrated admission control, and administrators can monitor workload class statistics in real-time. This allows for improved workload management administration, flexibility, and visibility.

Also, for the many SAP HANA customers using our ‘capture & replay’ tool, they can now jump-start to a certain replay point-in-time and can run real-time analysis for replay blocking situations. This can help administrators be more efficient and effective to detect, analyze, or verify any potential issues before applying changes or upgrades.

SAP HANA native storage extension (NSE) is a commonly used and proven technology to provide scalability and intelligent data tiering by placing data in hot and warm storage. The ability to do this can optimize the SAP HANA memory footprint, while at the same time assisting customers to reduce costs and improve price/performance characteristics. With SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, we have added another set of new features that help customers by providing guidance with an enhanced NSE advisor extended monitoring, as well as analysis capabilities and online (re-)partitioning. Administrators can now exclude database objects from recommendations and can configure the system so that statistics data is stored on NSE. This further reduces the memory footprint and ultimately the TCO.

For data integration with Smart Data Access (SDA) and SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, we are now supporting new virtualized data sources such as Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and 2019 as well as Oracle 18c and 19c editions. Also, we are providing support for connecting to SAP HANA Cloud using geospatial data types via the Remote Table Replication (RTR) capability if the source system is SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06. The RTR capability allows customers to seamlessly and dynamically extend their on-premises SAP HANA system data and objects via real-time log-based replication to SAP HANA Cloud in a hybrid scenario without a database migration.

SAP HANA has always been used as a mission-critical database platform with sensitive enterprise data, and as such, adherence to the latest enterprise security requirements is critical. When setting up a new database instance with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, it is now possible to set up Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer (TLS/SSL) automatically, allowing multiple user mappings for Security Assertion Markup Layer (SAML) and JSON Web Tokens (JWT), and supporting JWT provider configuration with public keys. The support for these new protocols provides additional enterprise security authentication options and flexibility.

We are also continuing to invest in our market-leading SAP HANA multi-model capabilities. In SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06, we are delivering numerous new and enhanced algorithms for SAP HANA geospatial and our machine learning Predictive Analysis Library (PAL). This includes advanced functions such as unified regression, spectral clustering, Bayesian (probabilistic) time series analysis (BCPD, BSTS), intermittent time series analysis, volatile time series analysis (GARCH), multivariate time series analysis (Vector ARIMA), and Unified Exponential Smoothing (incl. massive parallel forecasting, Additive Model time series analysis, model interpretability and explainability enhancements). The addition of these new algorithms allows developers and data scientists to create and embed intelligence in the next generation of advanced applications.

In summary, we have many planned exciting new features and updates with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06 allowing our customers to reduce their TCO, enhance security, simplify administration, and ultimately gain real business value from their data! As we have stated before, our customers can rest assured that they have our full commitment to help them safeguard and maximize their previous investments, and our planned new release of SAP HANA is delivering on that promise.

Want to learn more about the new SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06 release? If so, please register for the upcoming “What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 06 webinars” delivered by our SAP HANA Product Management team.

If you have any questions, please make sure to visit the SAP Community Q&A for SAP HANA or submit your question directly.