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Teched 2025 in Berlin. It was truly a great event and great experience meeting many of you in person, SAP colleagues, SAP customers, SAP partners and all the people who attended it and all those who are interested in technology and SAP solutions.
I had a pleasure to attend this event together with SAP HANA Cloud database team and deliver the
SAP HANA Cloud Database as a Service
First and foremost, SAP HANA Cloud is a database as a service (DBaaS). In contrast to database systems deployed in on-premise fashion, SAP HANA Cloud offers pleasant experience, allowing to focus on the core task - application development.
In traditional on-premise scenario there is a unquestionable need to take care of hardware maintenance and renewal cycles, on top of this there is an operating system and database maintenance that all have to be done to ensure that the system is functioning. SAP HANA Cloud is a service, it releases users from these complex and time-consuming tasks. The powerful cockpit provides information on the state of the system, users may observe and apply patches and upgrades there. The rest is managed and users become released from the maintenance tasks, having their focus kept on the application development. Refer to the operating model for SAP HANA Cloud.
Data tiering
SAP HANA Cloud promotes efficient data tiering options. The most critical data can be stored in memory ensuring very fast access. Important, but less frequently accessed data might be stored on disk. This is possible thanks to SAP HANA Native Storage Extension (NSE) technology. The data offloaded on disk can be accessed seamlessly without a need for writing additional SQL queries for disk and in-memory access with NSE. There are also various large data processing and archiving options - SAP HANA Data Lake Relational Engine, which allows to store petabyte scale data and access it using relational format. On top of that SAP HANA Cloud offers SAP HANA Data Lake Files - a cost efficient object store allowing to work with unstructured, semi-structured and structured data, supporting CSV, Parquet and Delta Lake formats.
Elastic Compute Node
Recently SAP HANA Cloud introduced Elastic Compute Node (ECN). Imagine repetitive business critical process such as quarterly report that put your database system under high load. This event occurs only few times in specific period. Oftentimes your solution would be adding (purchasing) new or extra hardware components to meet demands. But what happens for the rest of the time? This hardware remains idle, because it is active only at the quarter end, to run the report. SAP HANA Cloud allows to provision elastic compute nodes to address these on-demand needs. Once the process is completed and there is no need for additional capacity, the elastic compute nodes can be deprovisioned. And this could be managed both via SAP HANA Cloud central (UI) - database administration tool and via API, giving the users even more flexibility.
SAP HANA Cloud - database for Business AI
SAP HANA Cloud offers various AI options to its users. It helps building AI applications utilizing knowledge graph and vector engines. It offers AI co-pilots ensuring efficient application development. In addition to this there is AI for database operations for improved automation and AI-driven insights and AI for database administrators for easier database administration thanks to conversational interfaces.
The recent addition to the SAP HANA Cloud multimodel - knowledge graph allows to derive more business context from data. While large language model interprets natural language, the knowledge graph engine adds meaning to the data. In such AI scenario various SAP HANA Cloud multi model engines (vector, spatial, text search) could be combined to ensure insightful results. The knowledge graph might be used in RAG scenarios (Retrieval Augmented Generation) where it provides context to LLMs (Large Language Model).
SAP HANA Cloud Migration
For those who are currently running SAP HANA database on-premise, or SAP HANA as a Service (Cloud Foundry or Neo platform) and are willing to make most of the innovations with SAP HANA Cloud, there is a way to transition.
Whether you use SAP HANA as a traditional database for your custom application, or you are using full capabilities of SAP HANA Extended Service Classic or Advanced (XSC, XSA) you can migrate these and there are various options available.
SAP HANA Cloud Self-Service Migration tool
This service can be found in the SAP HANA Cloud Cockpit, and is accessible as long as you have access to SAP HANA Cloud or SAP HANA Cloud central. This service is used to migrate SAP HANA database components (SQL layer) such as tables, views, procedures and data records. It also provides downtime-optimized migration method, to keep business-critical activities running during migration. The tool migrates SAP HANA XSA service instances, which is relevant for those who have XSA-managed schemas or HDI containers. These instances will be automatically created by the Self-Service in SAP HANA Cloud Cloud Foundry space if required.
SAP HANA Application Migration Assistant
The SAP HANA Application Migration Assistant is an extension for the SAP BTP Business Application Studio. It allows to migrate so-called design-time artefacts (Calculation Views, CDS Views, etc) to SAP HANA Cloud CAP (Cloud Application Programming Model) or SAP HANA Cloud Native. The tool requires Business Application Studio subscription and SAP HANA version 2.0. Various supported migration scenarios displayed on the image below:
Both the SAP HANA Cloud Self-Service migration tool and SAP HANA Application Migration Assistant provide extensive SAP HANA migration coverage allowing to migrate SAP HANA XS applications, SAP HANA database objects and data records stored in SAP HANA databases.
Migration Services
- Migration help desk provides technical support for any questions related only to database migrations executed with the migration self service tool for SAP HANA Cloud migrationhelpdesk@sap.com
- SAP HANA Database Migration Factory provides a high-touch expert support for SAP HANA Cloud migrations offering free migration assessments. Fixed bid, including migration project plan from architecture planning, optimization, migration, and testing to go-live migrationfactory@sap.com
- SAP MaxAttention Program - limited to certain customers with SAP MaxAttention program contracts. The program offers support for the migration journey from database strategy and assessments to post go-live health check.
Useful Links
Official Migration Product Page
SAP HANA Cloud Migration Guide
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