SAP BW/4HANA 2023 Now Supports SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake Relational Engine

[RobertWaywell]

An effective data tiering strategy is important for managing growing data volumes in a cost effective way while keeping all of the relevant data accessible to be queried and analyzed as needed. SAP BW/4HANA Data Tiering Optimization (DTO) is an excellent implementation of data tiering that provides a central UI configuring data as hot, warm, or cold data and then automates the movement of the data to the appropriate storage location. Hot and warm data are managed within the HANA database with the hot data being configured as in-memory HANA data and the warm data being configured to be stored primarily on disk utilizing HANA's Native Storage Extension (NSE) capabilities. 

As a BW/4HANA system continues to grow, many customers also see the need to offload cold data from HANA to separate physical storage in an SAP IQ database. Again, the BW/4HANA tooling supports configuring the desired data to be "cold" data and automates the movement of the designated data from HANA to SAP IQ. All of the data stored in SAP IQ continues to be available for querying through BW/4HANA

Using SAP IQ to scale the data volume of a BW/4HANA system allows the system data volume to grow at a lower cost than maintaining all of the data in the HANA database but it also introduces a separate database system to manage. This is where SAP HANA Cloud, data lake relational engine comes in. 

SAP HANA Cloud, data lake relational engine (HDLRE) is the cloud native version of SAP IQ. As a fully managed cloud service, provisioning, maintaining, and monitoring an HDLRE system requires a much lower level of effort than maintaining an on premise system. My blog Top 5 Reasons to Migrate SAP IQ Systems to SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake provides more detail on the benefits of migrating from SAP IQ to HDLRE.

The February 2025 feature pack release of SAP BW/4HANA 2023 introduces support for using SAP HANA Cloud, data lake relational engine as an alternative to an on premise SAP IQ system. 

SAP HANA Data Lake, Relational Engine as Cold Store (New) 

"The integration of SAP HANA Cloud, data lake Relational Engine with SAP BW/4HANA allows for efficient data management by separating frequently accessed data from rarely accessed data. Using data lake Relational Engine as cold store, you can reduce resource demands and costs while outsourcing hardware and software management to the cloud, making it an attractive solution to optimize your data storage strategy."

Architecturally the system configuration looks like this: