SAP HANA Developer Edition 1.00 SPS11

After several months we finally have the SPS11 SAP HANA Developer Edition live with the brand new SAP HANA XSA configured and running, unfortunately being early meant we had a few problems along the way so hopefully you'll all be happy with the results - we are that is for sure!

SAP HANA Extended Application Services

We introduce an exciting new capability called SAP HANA Extended Application Services (sometimes referred to unofficially as XS or XS Engine). The core concept of SAP HANA Extended Application Services is to embed a full featured application server, web server, and development environment within the SAP HANA appliance itself. However this isn't just another piece of software installed on the same hardware as SAP HANA; instead SAP has decided to truly integrate this new application services functionality directly into the deepest parts of the SAP HANA database itself, giving it an opportunity for performance and access to SAP HANA differentiating features that no other application server has.

Getting flexible with SAP HANA

Most of you might not be aware of a feature introduced on SAP HANA SPS5. This new feature is called "Flexible Tables", which means that you can define a table that will grow depending on your needs. Let's see an example...

You define a table with ID, NAME and LAST_NAME. The table works fine, but you realize that you need to also add the PhoneNumber and Address...in a normal situation, you will need to open the definition and add those fields...but using Flexibles Tables, you will need to only add those fields as part of the INSERT query and let SAP HANA do it's magic...

Of course, that scenario is very unlikely to happen, because for a couple of fields, it doesn't make sense...so...where do we use this Flexible Tables? Enterprise Search, were we need to have all products on one table, and this table can have a really big amount of columns...as different products will have different characteristics...

So...for this blog...I really break my head trying to find a simple scenario that could cover Flexible Tables...what I came up with? SAP HANA, Flexible Tables, R and Twitter...

The code is very complex, so I'm not going to explain line by line how it works...but of course, I'm going to give a nice overview...