New Features and Functionality in SAP HANA

SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

SAP recently released SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04. SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

Database enhancements 

• Advanced data and privacy protection including enhanced data anonymization with additional algorithms and configurable retention policies for the audit log. 
• Improvements for high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) will further increase system availability and help protect enterprise-critical applications with a new multi-target system replication option that now also supports multiple region-local A/A secondary, a further enhanced time travel option and a “Follow-the-sun” option that optimizes the latency for write transactions by rotating the primary system around the world. 
• SAP HANA now also offers a fast-restart option that is using TMPFS on OS Level to significantly reduce restart times with existing hardware. 
• The new Native Storage Extension allows tables, columns or partitions to be flagged as warm data, residing mainly on disk. Warm data is loaded to an in-memory buffer cache only as required for query processing. 

Data Management enhancements

• Support for federated access to high-availability Hadoop clusters, and a generic adapter framework for Smart Data Access. 
• Smart Data Integration now allows to group multiple agents, provides real-time support for Mainframe DB2 and integration into Web IDE. 
• To enhance the quality of your data SAP now provides geocoding support for India addresses and FIAS compliant address assignments in Russia.
• The Enterprise Architecture Designer now offers support for SAP Big Data Services and Hadoop Hive 2.0 data lakes as well as support for HANA versioned tables. 
• Calculation View modeling via Web IDE now allows to integrate data sources more easily, comes with improved user experience, enhanced support for parallelization and extended variable support for models.

Analytical Intelligence enhancements 

• Increase the execution performance and productivity for data scientists by providing API’s for Python and R as well as a new Gradient Boosting Tree algorithm. 
• New methods for linear referencing, hexagonal grid-based aggregation, labeling tools, new APIs with reduced memory footprint and Data Hub integration will allow you to gain the most insight from geocoding your business data. 
• Improved flexibility, debugging support, new functions and algorithms as well as extended GraphScript capabilities and openCypher support allow more complex analyses and scenarios for your connected data.

Application Development and Tool enhancements  

• View functions for both SQLScript and SQL, SQLScript Debugger and Code Analyzer enhancements and a unit test framework. 
• The Web IDE comes with improved editors, Python support, wizards and dialogs and now allows multiple workspaces and mass import of synonyms. 
• A pending deployment indicator helps developer to keep track of their deployment. 
• The XSA runtime now supports X.509 as well as SPNEGO authentication, supports tenant specific installations and support for symbolic links.
• The HANA Run Time Tools include an enhanced SQL console with session recovery, performance improvements and more flexibility. 
• The catalog browser now supports search across multiple schemas and comes with an improved user experience.

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Check out our new Whitepaper "What's new in SAP HANA?" to learn more about additional features and functionality found in the latest release of SAP HANA

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