Summer is slowly coming to an end, at least for the colleagues located in the northern hemisphere. And with the end of the summer, we are also approaching yet another end of a quarter. With this blogpost, I want to provide you with a summary of the exciting innovations that have been introduced to SAP HANA Cloud in Q3 2022.
To get a detailed overview of individual functionalities and changes, including demos and a Q&A, don’t miss out and register now for our release webinar hosted by the SAP HANA Cloud product management team.
But for now, let’s look at the main highlights of the recent SAP HANA Cloud release:
Innovations in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database
As always, we have invested in our SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database over the past quarter. There have been a few notable innovations e.g., enhanced version control, new built-in algorithms for graph processing, extended JSON document store capabilities, support for additional runtimes for SAP Business Technology Platform, performance optimizations regrading calculation view modeling as well as some news in the data privacy and protection area.
Increased version transparency and enhanced upgrade/upgrade options
With the third release of SAP HANA Cloud in 2022, users will be notified within SAP HANA Cloud Central in detail, once a new version or patch for the SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database is available.
Notification: New patch available – SAP HANA Cloud Central
You will now be able to update or upgrade your instances to a specific version of your choosing (Disclaimer: The version can differ from the latest one by a maximum of the two last versions).
patch version selection – SAP HANA Cloud Central
Apart from enhanced upgrade notifications and version transparency during the upgrade process, the provisioning wizard is now providing the possibility to select dedicated SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database versions. Unlike before, you can now also select older versions of the SAP HANA database to be provisioned.
version selection during instance provisioning – SAP HANA Cloud Central
These newly introduced functionalities offer a higher degree of control when upgrading and provisioning SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database instances. Users are no longer forced to choose the latest version when upgrading or provisioning. This way instances and landscapes can be kept aligned on different QRCs more easily.
Built-in Betweenness Centrality algorithm & page rank algorithm
By the end of Q3 2022, two additional built-in graph processing algorithms are supported within the SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database: The betweenness centrality algorithm and the page rank algorithm.
The first one helps to detect the most influential node for information flow in graph networks. It provides a measure of centrality in a graphs based on shortest paths and supports wide application in network theory.
betweenness centrality alogrithm – example
The second algorithm helps to detect the most important node in a graph network. It provides a measure of number of incoming relationships and the most important source nodes.
page rank algorithm – example
Both built-in algorithms are exposed through stored procedures written in GraphScript in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database. Moreover, both can easily be applied and displayed via the SAP HANA database explorer. You can integrate the algorithms into SQL statements, embed them into other SQL procedures and copy as well as adjust them to your specific business needs. Both therefore, enable simpler and faster development of applications that use graph processing.
The built-in graph processing capabilities, in general, allow low-code and no-code principles to be applied which reduce the programming and testing effort, and eliminate the need for specialized programming skills for graph processing, ultimately resulting in lower TCO.
Support for JSON object expression and JSON string in SQL statements
Since the latest release of SAP HANA Cloud, the SAP HANA database document store now supports object expressions, where string literals have single quotes in SQL statements and JSON strings, where string literals have double quotes in SQL statements.
With the broadened support, database developers can choose to use the well-known object expression in SQL or JSON strings, which are popular in various client programming languages.
Greedy pruning to speed up query processing in calculation views
We are once again enhancing the performance of statements, while also reducing the resource consumption during join execution: The greedy pruning option ensures that joins are only executed if they are required to retrieve requested columns. It is independent of the join type or the cardinality setting. You can activate greedy pruning for the left, the right, or both sides of a join.
New ownership and object privileges on database remote source adapters
Another innovation I briefly want to highlight is the new possibility to define ownership and object privileges on database remote source adapters. The new system privilege enables the creation of new remote adapters but does not allow manipulation of existing ones. Unless the user has object-level privileges on this adapter. This new functionality supports the assignment of object-level privileges on the remote adapter to its creator or owner, who can grant these privileges to other users.
Furthermore, the capabilities provide the ability for users with the “ADAPTER ADMIN” system privilege to continue working with all remote adapters as before, without having explicit object privileges on a specific adapter.
With the newly introduced privileges, separation of permissions on objects managed by SAP and the customers is improved and easier to control.
New certificate store capabilities
With the most recent release of SAP HANA Cloud, duplicate X.509 certificates can be stored if a certificate name has been provided. In addition, administrators can change the comment for an X.509 certificate or public key.
These new certificate store capabilities simplify the lifecycle management for different applications running on one SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database as they can now manage their own certificates.
Other Innovations
Runtimes independence for provisioning and managing database instances in SAP Business Technology Platform
Furthermore, since the Q3 release of SAP HANA Cloud, instances can be provisioned and managed using the graphical tools and command-line interfaces (CLIs) of SAP HANA Cloud independent of any Cloud Foundry or Kyma runtime environment. Therefore, the SAP BTP user authentication for the tools and CLIs for SAP HANA Cloud happens on the subaccount scope, not the Cloud Foundry space scope. SAP BTP subaccount admins can now use roles and role collections to manage tool and CLI access for SAP HANA Cloud as well as establish trust with their own corporate identity and manage access to the tools by adding users through their own corporate identity provider. SAP BTP subaccount users are now able to operate SAP HANA Cloud without dependence on the SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry environment. Therefore, this innovation improves the integration and consistency with other SAP BTP services.
Nevertheless, existing Cloud Foundry-based management tools and APIs will still be available.
Developers may want to note that the SAP HANA Schemas & HDI Containers service is not yet available for Kyma, so Kyma development using HDI containers is not included in this release.
EU Access datacenter availability in Switzerland on MS Azure
As of beginning of October 2022, we’ll be happy to provide an additional EU-only access data center. The newest addition to our data center landscape offers data center availability with EU-only access in the European region through a Microsoft Azure data center in Switzerland.
The picture below summarizes the currently available datacenter options for SAP HANA Cloud, including the future deployment on MS Azure in Switzerland.
Data center Availability SAP HANA Cloud
Innovations in the SAP HANA Database Explorer
The SAP HANA database explorer is an integral part of SAP HANA Cloud. With the September release of SAP HANA Cloud, there have also been some great enhancements there: New wizards for importing and exporting as well as restoring data lake files snapshots.
New import and export functionality in the database explorer wizards
It is now possible to specify an SAP HANA Cloud, data lake file container as a source or target of an import and export operation.
Data Lake Files as Import/Export destination
Earlier, when accessing cloud storage for import and export operations, the credentials required to access the storage needed to be entered in the database explorer each time one of the wizards was used.
These credentials can now be stored in the database so that they do not have to be entered each time.
CREATE CREDENTIAL FOR USER DBADMIN
COMPONENT 'SAPHANAIMPORTEXPORT' PURPOSE 'gcsImport' TYPE 'PASSWORD' USING 'user=<client_email>;password=<private_key>';
Notice below that the credential type is “Database Credential” rather than “secret key”.
import data from Google Cloud Storage using stored credentials
“Restore snapshot” wizard for data lake files
Additionally, users are now able to restore a folder’s state to a selected date and time (Disclaimer: This is only possible within the past 14 days). Use the database explorer to access the feature from a data lake files connection.
restore snapshot SAP HANA Cloud, data lake file storage
Innovations in the SAP HANA Clients
There have also been various enhancements to the SAP HANA Clients. Linux ARM64 on AWS Graviton support, new node.js connection pool, and data lake relational engine client support for the .NET framework.
Linux ARM64 on AWS Graviton Support for the SAP HANA Client
With QRC3 of SAP HANA Cloud drivers to connect to SAP HANA via Linux ARM64 (AWS Graviton) are now supported. The drivers are available for Python and Node.js via PyPI and NPM.
This allows more options to choose from when accessing SAP HANA.
Node.js connection pool for the SAP HANA database client
This innovation allows users to explicitly create multiple customized connection pools while also being able to set the capacity of the connection pool. It also permits users to directly obtain connections from the pool while additionally providing time-out functionality to evict connections from the pool.
All these changes improve users’ flexibility to control the properties of connection pools.
Data lake relational engine client support for the .NET framework by Microsoft
With the Q3 release of SAP HANA Cloud the SAP HANA Cloud, data lake relational engine now provides a driver for .NET apps. Therefore, supporting Microsoft Windows and Linux systems.
The extended support enables more language options for customers to use when accessing the SAP HANA Cloud, data lake relational engine.
General News
Besides the great innovations that are part of the Q3 2022 release of SAP HANA Cloud, there two more exciting pieces of news I want to share with you.
While the first Early Adopter Care program just ended earlier this year, I am happy to announce that there will be a new one starting later this year. Additionally, I don’t want to miss highlighting our new openSAP course diving deep into the topic of calculation view modeling within SAP HANA Cloud.
New Early Adopter Care program for SAP HANA Cloud
Are you already using SAP HANA Cloud? And are you looking to get support for specific projects using some newly added features of SAP HANA Cloud? Then our new Early Adopter Care program will be a great fit for you. You will be in direct contact with SAP project coaches and development angels to get you on track adopting some recently released features of SAP HANA Cloud.
Don’t miss out, register until October 31 and get started with your project using multi-model processing, advanced analytics & machine learning, or hybrid scenarios & data replication.
New OpenSAP Course on Calculation View Modeling
I am also happy to share our newest addition to the openSAP portfolio on SAP HANA Cloud: Working with calculation views in SAP HANA Cloud.
Benefit from expert-led content provided by SAP for you for free. Take part in the course to learn how to develop SAP HANA calculation view models in SAP HANA Cloud. Get to know more about the basic concepts of the SAP HANA Cloud development environment as well as the SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI).
An overview of the new calculation view modeling options will be covered and followed by a deep dive into performance topics and the various performance techniques helping you to get the most out of calculation view modeling. The course concludes with an in-depth focus on the background to several optimization techniques and the inner workings of calculation view performance settings, as well as providing troubleshooting tips and tricks.
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