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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New Innovations in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

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 announced the release of 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.

Here are the latest innovations in SAP HANA from SAP.

• Data tiering enhancements for improved scale
• Persistent memory hardware availability
• Scale-out enhancements
• Data protection and privacy
• Smart data access and Hadoop integration
• Hexagon grid clustering for spatial data
• Data scientist and machine learning improvements
• Spatial performance enhancements and algorithms
• User experience optimizations throughout

Learn more about SAP HANA at: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/05/whats-new-in-sap-hana-2.0-sps-04-2/

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What's new in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03

SAP recently announces the upcoming release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03 planned for April 2018. Read the official announcement from SAP for the full details. Here are some of the major highlights from this exciting release.

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 HANA 2.0 SPS 03 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

• Database enhancements allow for advanced data and privacy protection. Improvements for high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) will further increase system availability and help protect enterprise-critical applications. Enhancements in the areas of multi-tenant database container (MDC), dynamic tiering, workload and performance management and analysis further improve performance and usability.
• Data Management enhancements include new data integration and federation sources with additional supported data types to bring you a broader view of the business. Enhanced and simplified functionality helps you to further improve the quality of your data.
• Analytical Intelligence enhancements further increase execution performance and productivity for data scientists as well as extended features that will allow you to gain the most insight from geocoding your business data. Improvements for graph support more complex analysis and scenarios for your connected data. And new sentiment analysis for additional languages means you can cover larger markets with text analysis.
• Application Development and Tool enhancements simplify development, improve performance, expand use cases and enable a new class of security for applications. Additions to officially supported runtimes in XSA provide more options for your application server layer of development.

Read the full announcement on www.approyo.com 

Ask Approyo - What new technical functions are available in SAP HANA 2 compared to the older SAP HANA versions?

Lately, we have talked a lot about SAP HANA 2.0 and how it can impact your company. We are seeing more and more deployments of SAP HANA 2.0 environments across our customers businesses and the impact it is having. And with recent updates like SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02, now is the time to make the move to SAP HANA 2. What are some of these new functions that can help your business?

The next-generation of SAP’s in-memory platform, SAP HANA 2.0, simplifies database and data management – and makes it easier for application developers to deliver smart, insight-driven apps. The platform’s new capabilities are optimized for innovation and can help your business compete more effectively in the digital economy. And because SAP HANA 2.0 is a continuation of the existing platform, you’ll have access to a stable, highly available, and secure data environment for your applications.

Key SAP HANA 2 features and enhancements to help IT transform include:

• Database management: There are multiple enhancements for high availability and security. For example, the new “active/active read-enabled” option allows IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to off-load read-intensive workloads for improved operations.
• Data management: The SAP HANA-based Web application SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer allows customers to visualize the impact of new technologies on their architecture before they are implemented. In addition, a tiered storage enhancement allows the distributed storage of data by priority regardless of where it resides. These are two of the many enhancements that have been developed for enterprise modeling, data integration, and data quality.
• Analytical intelligence: SAP HANA 2 is ideally equipped to enable customers to more effectively integrate additional insight obtained by analyzing text, spatial, graph and streaming data into their applications. For example, there are new algorithms in the predictive analytics library for time series, classification, and regression analysis to empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning into customer applications.
• Application development: Application developers will benefit from enhanced functions for application servers, new development tools, and development languages. In application programming, a new file processor interface enables developers to extract metadata from documents in order to gain newer, deeper insights.

Read the full blog post at www.approyo.com 

The Cloud Helpers Blog Series - In-Memory Computing

Welcome to our blog series, The Cloud Helpers. This series will focus on cloud computing topics and help you understand how the cloud can impact your business today and in the future. Today we are going to focus on In-Memory Computing.

What is In-Memory Computing?
In-memory computing is the storage of information in the main random access memory (RAM) of dedicated servers rather than in complicated relational databases operating on comparatively slow disk drives. In-memory computing helps business customers, including retailers, banks and utilities, to quickly detect patterns, analyze massive data volumes on the fly, and perform their operations quickly. The drop in memory prices in the present market is a major factor contributing to the increasing popularity of in-memory computing technology. This has made in-memory computing economical among a wide variety of applications.

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing
SAP HANA relies on in-memory computing to quickly analyze massive amounts of data. In-memory computing is a technology that allows the processing of tremendous quantities of data in main memory to provide immediate results from analysis and transaction. The data is available for processing or analysis immediately after it is created. SAP HANA's performance is 10,000 times faster when compared to standard disks, which allows companies to analyze data in a matter of seconds instead of long hours.

To achieve the preferred performance, in-memory computing adheres to the following basic concepts:

• Keep data in main memory to speed up data access.
• Minimize data movement by using the columnar storage concept and compression, and performing calculations at the database level.
• Divide and conquer by using multi-core architecture and multi-processor servers to meet growing demands.

Some of the advantages of in-memory computing include:

• The ability to cache countless amounts of data constantly. This ensures extremely fast response times for searches.
• The ability to store session data, allowing for the customization of live sessions and ensuring optimum website performance.
• The ability to process events for improved complex event processing

Innovating with In-Memory Technology
A recent study by IDC on Innovating with Real-Time Data and Insights with SAP HANA revealed three important examples  that illustrate  some of the ways SAP HANA  and In-Memory Computing customers are changing their businesses:

• Enablement of core customer-facing services: “SAP HANA is part of a greenfield buildout of an entirely new capability that didn’t exist anywhere, and no one else is doing this with a completely new use of technology. We didn’t have an existing service that SAP HANA snapped into; we built it from the ground up.”
• Understanding and responding to business patterns. One retail organization is achieving better business results because its stores “now have better and precise knowledge of consumption and because we can keep inventory up to date with SAP HANA.”
• Customer support teams. Granular and more robust insights about customer behavior enabled more effective support of customers for the 50-person team at one organization. It noted: “We’re using a tool driven by SAP HANA that allows us to be ahead of our customers so that we’ve already spotted anything that they see. So we’ll have already found that little nugget of information and have come up with ways to address their issue.”

Unlocking New Business Potential: Real-World Business Scenarios for SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA’s combination of technology and simplicity provides improved performance in orders of magnitude.

Beyond the underlying changes in technologies powering this new wave of ERP with SAP S/4HANA, are new business capabilities that simply weren’t possible before. These are not merely incremental improvements based on processes that have existed before, but transformation change delivered to each department, unlocking new value to the business.

Here are four such real-world business scenarios:

1. Supply Chain
Legacy: In a legacy ERP solution, inventory information is distributed among multiple database tables. That may be fine when counting inventory at night in the warehouse. But a financial task called a Post Goods Issue (PGI) requires locking the tables so that the transactions can post. In a high volume environment, this locking means that everyone must wait in order to proceed. That can mean that truck drivers at a logistics center may be asked to wait several hours for the legacy database to complete a batch update.

S/4HANA: In SAP S/4HANA, the underlying data model is simplified and accelerated so that inventory data is processed in real-time – and truck drivers can get back on the road. The S/4HANA solution also has the intelligence
to propose solutions to supply chain problems – and then implement them automatically.

2. Sales & Marketing
Legacy: With legacy ERP, there is no way to monitor social media feeds without add-on solutions that wend their way through the system. As a result, sales and marketing professionals can’t follow their customers in real-time.

S/4HANA: With SAP S/4HANA, your sales and marketing professionals can pull data directly from social media channels and analyze it in real-time. So they can identify trends, respond immediately to customers, and create targeted promotions. And they can market to an audience of one.

3. Forecasting
Legacy: With legacy ERP, forecasts can take days to produce – by which time they are stale.

S/4HANA: With SAP S/4HANA, you can run infinite what-if simulations that combine internal and external data in real-time – and evaluate the impact of each scenario. As a result, you can be better positioned to capitalize on opportunities – and mitigate risk.

4. Finance
Legacy: With legacy ERP, closing the books on the quarter or the year can be a weeks-long process with dozens of tables required to manage financial data from business units, headquarters, and regions. The process can be prone to errors and delays.

S/4HANA: With SAP S/4HANA, all business units and regions are consolidated into a single table that can be viewed in real-time – any time. That presents the opportunity to generate an anytime, “soft close” that issues financial statements immediately so that the accounting department can focus more on business outcomes, then reporting.

Download our Case Study: Saving the Trucking Industry with SAP HANA

Are you ready to experience SAP HANA?
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

Ask Approyo - What’s new in SAP HANA 2?

Since SAP announced SAP HANA 2 at SAP TechEd Barcelona earlier this month, many people have been asking, "What's really new about SAP HANA 2?"SAP has been releasing more information about SAP HANA 2 since the announcement.

Here are some of the highlights of the new features found in SAP HANA 2.

• Database management: SAP HANA 2 helps your IT organization ensure business continuity with high-availability, security, workload management, and administration enhancements. For example, the new active/active read-enabled feature helps IT take advantage of secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to improve operations by offloading read-intensive workloads.
• Data management: With this release, you can make the most of all data regardless of where it resides, with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality, and dynamic tiering. For example, the Web application SAP® Enterprise Architecture Designer, edition for SAP HANA, helps your IT organization manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.
• Analytical intelligence: SAP HANA 2 helps your developers embed rich insight into applications through enhanced analytical-processing engines for text, spatial, graph, and streaming data. For example, we have added new algorithms for classification, association, time series, and regression to the predictive analytics library, enabling data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning in custom applications.
• Application development: SAP HANA 2 helps developers build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced capabilities for the application server and expanded development tool sets and language coverage. For example, a new file-processor application programming interface lets developers embed file filters into applications to extract text or metadata from documents to deliver deeper insights. 

Are you ready to experience the next version of SAP HANA?
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

SAP Announces HANA 2 in-memory database platform

SAP unveiled SAP HANA 2, the next-generation of the SAP HANA platform. These announcements were made at SAP TechEd Barcelona held on Nov. 8–10.

“SAP pioneered in-memory computing with the launch of SAP HANA in 2010 and throughout our journey we have driven breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, Products and Innovation, SAP SE. “The release of SAP HANA 2 marks a milestone in the industry, as it represents the next generation of SAP HANA that will propel customers toward a successful and prosperous digital future.”

SAP HANA 2 is planned to be released to customers on November 30, 2016. The express edition of SAP HANA 2 will be available for delivery shortly after general availability to help organizations jump-start new development projects. As an innovation platform, SAP HANA 2 will deliver technology enhancements twice a year to support agile IT.

What is SAP HANA 2.0?
The next-generation of SAP’s in-memory platform, SAP HANA 2.0, simplifies database and data management – and makes it easier for application developers to deliver smart, insight-driven apps. The platform’s new capabilities are optimized for innovation and can help your business compete more effectively in the digital economy. And because SAP HANA 2.0 is a continuation of the existing platform, you’ll have access to a stable, highly available, and secure data environment for your applications.

Planned new key features and enhancements to help IT transform include:

• Database management: IT organizations will be able to provide business continuity with enhanced high availability, security, workload management and administration enhancements. For example, the new active/active read-enabled option enables IT organizations to leverage secondary systems – previously used only for system replication – to off-load read-intensive workloads for improved operations.
• Data management: Businesses are expected to leverage data, regardless of where it resides, with enhancements to enterprise modeling, data integration, data quality and tiered storage. A new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application that works with and is powered by SAP HANA allows IT organizations to manage complex information architectures and visualize the potential impact of new technologies before they are implemented.
• Analytical intelligence: Developers are embedding rich insight into applications with enhanced analytical processing engines for text, spatial, graph and streaming data. For example, new algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression have been added to the predictive analytics library to empower data scientists to discover new patterns and incorporate machine learning into custom applications.
• Application development: Developers are expected to build and deploy next-generation applications with enhanced functions for application servers, development tools and languages. For example, bring-your-own-language support provides a choice of additional third-party build packs and runtimes that can be used within SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model. Also, a new file processor API enables developers to extract text and metadata from documents to deliver deeper insights.

Are you ready to experience the next version of SAP HANA?
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.