- SAP Managed Tags
The first quarter of 2025 is about to come to an end and all SAP HANA Cloud enthusiasts know what that means: We have now released the first delivery of our product in 2025. Today I am thrilled to share more details about the innovations that are part of the recent delivery.
Before we dive into details, I highly recommend watching this short video to get an overview of the highlights of this release. Now without further ado, let’s dive deeper into the newly released innovations.
Innovations in SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database
Multi-Model Data Processing
Knowledge Graph Engine in SAP HANA Cloud
Drum roll, please!
I am thrilled to announce that SAP HANA Cloud now includes a knowledge graph engine that allows for sophisticated data modeling and querying with its native triplestore.
SAP HANA Cloud is now enabled to use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for structuring data and to utilize the SPARQL execution engine to query RDF datasets. You can now easily map relational data into the knowledge graph framework, incorporating subject, object, and predicate structures. Moreover, seamlessly switch between traditional SQL queries and SPARQL queries, enhancing flexibility and usability.
Benefit from:
- Improved Decision-Making: By leveraging the knowledge graph engine, you can gain deeper insights from your data, enabling more informed and accurate decision-making.
- Enhanced Logical Formality: The structured nature of RDF and SPARQL ensures a high degree of logical formality, making your data models more precise and reliable.
- Performance and Scalability: Benefit from improved performance and scalability when handling RDF data alongside relational data. SAP HANA Cloud's advanced architecture ensures that you can manage large datasets efficiently.
- Advanced Data Modeling: The knowledge graph engine allows for more complex and expressive data modeling, capturing relationships and hierarchies that are challenging to represent in purely relational models.
With the new engine, SAP HANA Cloud empowers you to unlock the full potential of your data, facilitating smarter analytics, more efficient data management, and improved business outcomes.
If you want to get your hands dirty and start with your projects leveraging the benefits of the knowledge graph engine, then I’d recommend having a look at this blogpost and register for our Early Adopter Care Program where you will work with product management and development hand-in-hand to bring your project to life!
Support a new algorithm for maximum flow graph problems
Good news for all multi-model fans. The latest SAP HANA Cloud release introduces support for a new algorithm to solve maximum flow graph problems. We've implemented Dinic's algorithm, optimized for capacity-limited networks, to handle complex graph scenarios more efficiently.
This enhancement enables real-time processing and analysis of large graph datasets. With this update, you can accelerate maximum flow computations, improve real-time decision-making, and simplify graph analysis processes, all while enjoying faster and more reliable computation outcomes.
Support for altering vector indexes
The release of the vector engine was a highlight in 2024. Since then, we are striving to improve it and are now happy to announce the support for the `ALTER VECTOR INDEX` statement. This new functionality allows you to modify the properties or configuration of existing vector indexes, ensuring they stay aligned with evolving data structures and business needs.
By keeping your indexes up-to-date, you can enhance performance, maintain data accuracy, and better control and monitor access to your indexed data.
Supporting storage of vector data with native storage extension
We also improve the capabilities for managing large-scale vector data! Our latest release introduces support for storing vector data using the SAP HANA native storage extension.
This allows you to leverage disk-based storage, significantly reducing storage costs for massive vector datasets. Additionally, it enables seamless scalability to handle ever-growing volumes of vector data, making it easier and more cost-effective to manage and analyze your data.
Administration and Service Management
Obtain a copy of an instance through backup and recovery
We strive to make your data management experience seamless and secure. The first innovation I want to introduce is the ability to obtain a copy of an instance of SAP HANA Cloud through backup and recovery.
This powerful new feature empowers users with self-service capabilities to recover a backup from a source SAP HANA Cloud system to a target system. Whether you need to restore data after an incident or want to create a new environment for testing, this feature makes it simple and intuitive. Safeguard your data against loss through reliable backups and quick recovery. Intuitively create a Quality Assurance (QA) system using effortless replication. This new feature ensures that your operations are secure, efficient, and resilient.
Automated generation of issue summaries
Moreover, we are introducing automated generation of issue summaries. This advanced feature produces human-readable summaries, helping you identify the root cause of an issue and resolve it quickly. They make it easy to…
- understand the issues affecting your system with clear and concise summaries,
- pinpoint suspicious root causes linked to observed system performance issues,
- and to receive actionable insights to help you resolve issues promptly.
By reducing the time it takes to discover the root cause of issues and providing actionable insights, we help you maintain a stable and high-performing system. Address performance problems before they escalate, ensuring minimal disruption.
Template-based instance copy into an existing instance
With the new template-based instance copy into existing instances, SAP HANA Cloud users can now streamline their quality assurance (QA) and development workflows. The feature enables users to provision multiple instances from a single template, ensuring consistency and efficiency across environments. Whether setting up QA systems or expanding capacity, users can quickly and intuitively replicate configurations without manual effort, reducing setup time and minimizing errors.
By simplifying instance management, this enhancement accelerates deployment, improves operational reliability, and strengthens scalability, helping businesses maintain high-performance database environments with ease. Experience faster, more efficient instance provisioning while ensuring system integrity across SAP HANA Cloud.
Machine Learning & Predictive Analytics
Multitask machine learning models and automated machine learning performance
Our latest SAP HANA Cloud release brings significant advancements for data scientists and application developers with various new machine learning capabilities. Through enhancements in the predictive analysis library (PAL), we now support Hybrid Gradient Boosting Tree (HGBT) for building superior regression models and Multitask Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models with unified classification function and support for advanced explainability features. Additionally, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is now faster and more efficient thanks to the introduction of random search with hyperband optimization.
These updates enable you to build more accurate models, improve transparency in AI applications, and speed up model training, making it easier to leverage AI for meaningful business insights.
New extraction of text from binary files
With the Q1 2025 release of SAP HANA Cloud, we also introduce a powerful new feature that allows for the extraction of text from binary files. With the document filters library plug-in, you can now extract text from binary documents like PDFs stored in the database.
This functionality unlocks valuable information hidden within these files, enabling data scientists and developers to vectorize the text for various downstream tasks such as similarity search, text mining, and classification. This enhancement not only widens the scope of your data analysis but also makes it easier to leverage text-based insights in your applications.
New generative AI toolkit, including support for Python, vectorization, natural language, and more
I am thrilled to introduce our new generative AI toolkit for SAP HANA Cloud! This powerful addition includes an open-source Python library, bringing advanced generative AI capabilities to your fingertips. Moreover, you can leverage the vector engine for context store creation, perform natural-language-driven dataframe analysis, and generate machine learning scenarios effortlessly. Key features also include retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with multiple vector stores and integration with large language models (LLMs) via the generative AI Hub SDK.
Benefits include streamlined machine learning development with natural language assistance providing a faster getting-started experience, automated code generation based on customer best-practice samples and business-scenario examples, and seamless Python integration, making your development process more efficient and intuitive.
If you are looking for a more detailed introduction to the innovations in the Machine learning sphere, please have a look at the comprehensive blogpost by my colleague Christoph Morgen.
Graphical View Modeling
As usual, the latest release of SAP HANA Cloud also introduced many enhancements and new functionalities for graphical view modeling with so-called calculation views.
Cleanup of intermediate data previews
This new feature allows you to clean up old intermediate data preview views efficiently. By using the option "Data Preview with other Database User," you can select and delete individual views, ensuring a tidier and more manageable data environment.
This allows you to easily clean up HDI containers and maintain a well-organized and optimized data storage environment. Moreover, this enables you to minimize the number of views in the containers, eventually making it easier to manage and navigate through your data. Lastly, it limits access to intermediate results by removing old data preview views and thus improves data security by ensuring that only necessary and relevant data is accessible.
The new feature is designed to help you keep your data environment clean, secure, and efficient. With the ability to selectively clean up old data preview views, you can better manage your infrastructure and optimize your data usage.
Deriving multiple filter values using functions, tables, or views
Next, we are happy to enhance your ability to preprocess entered values before generating a filter by offering an option to derive multiple values for filtering using functions, views, or tables. Benefit from greater flexibility and more precision in data queries.
Enable entered values to be preprocessed before a filter is generated. For example, you can dynamically filter for the dates within a quarter when the user enters “Q1,” making it easier to work with complex date ranges.
Execution hint for optimized currency conversion performance
I am excited to introduce a new execution hint enabling optimized currency conversion performance. By using this execution hint, you can postpone data type conversion to a later stage during currency conversion, enhancing both speed and precision.
The new hint improves the efficiency and accuracy of your currency conversion processes. By using it, you can achieve faster and more precise currency conversions, ensuring that your financial operations run smoothly and accurately
Expression editor offering a vector embedding function
I am pleased that the vector embedding function `VECTOR_EMBEDDING` is now supported in SQL expressions. This means you can now leverage the power of the vector engine within calculation views to improve the performance and functionality.
Reduce the complexity of your data processing tasks by incorporating vector embedding functions. Achieve smarter and more efficient data models, leading to better insights and faster results.
Option to create calculation views with a feature set of a certain database release
Furthermore, I want to introduce you to a new option allowing you to choose the database release for which a calculation view should be created. This feature enables you to tailor the development of calculation views to match the release version of your production system, ensuring compatibility and seamless integration.
Ensure compatibility by safeguarding that the modeling features used in your calculation views are also available in your productive system. Simplify the deployment process and reduce the risk of inconsistencies between development and production environments. Enhance the longevity and stability of your data models by aligning them with the capabilities of your database and your upgrade strategy. This new feature is designed to enhance the robustness and reliability of your calculation view development.
If you are looking for more details on the graphical view modeling innovations, make sure to check out this blogpost by Jan Zwickel.
Innovations in SAP HANA Cloud, data lake
App for Data lake files in SAP HANA Cloud Central
In this upcoming QRC, we will introduce a new app on SAP HANA Cloud for data lake files! This app will provide new features in the database administration tooling that aim to improve efficiency when working with the contents of a data lake files instance. These features include:
- The ability to browse the contents of a data lake files instance from within the app.
- New capabilities to upload, move, rename, and delete files.
- View text files (CSV, JSON, and txt), Apache Parquet, and image files.
- Perform point-in-time recovery to recover a previous version of your instance.
- Create and manage policy lists
Creating virtual table connections from the relational engine for the data lake to SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise
I am pleased to announce that we are adding a new feature that allows you to define and query virtual tables connecting from the relational engine for SAP HANA Cloud, data lake to an on-premise database for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE). This innovation bridges the gap between cloud and on-premise environments, offering you increased flexibility and seamless data integration.
Enable data tiering to the SAP HANA Cloud’s data lake relational engine, allowing you to distribute data more effectively across different storage tiers and thus to optimize cost and performance by leveraging both the cloud and on-premise data storage capabilities. Offload complex analytics and reporting capabilities from SAP ASE to the relational engine to enhance performance and reduce the workload on your on-premise systems. This new feature is designed to help you manage your data more effectively and efficiently, providing a seamless integration experience between your on-premise and cloud environments.
Further Innovations & Enhancements
Expanded Data Center Availability: Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Saudia Arabia and the US
To meet customer demands and support their business use cases, SAP HANA Cloud is now available in seven new data centers globally across multiple cloud platform providers. Additional SAP HANA Cloud data centers are now available in Brazil (Saõ Paolo), Japan (Osaka & Tokyo) and Saudi Arabia (Dammam) on Google Cloud Platform.
Furthermore, another data center has been established in the US (Oregon) on Amazon Web Services. Also, two Microsoft Azure data centers have been added, one in China (Hebei) and another one in Central Canada.
Database Application Development
Project explorer: upgrade .hdiconfig
With our latest release of SAP HANA Cloud, we are making it easier to keep your projects up-to-date with a new upgrade feature in the project explorer. With just a right-click, you can now upgrade your project's .hdiconfig file to the latest version. The tool will automatically read your current version, compare it with the latest, and if you're not up-to-date, it will seamlessly update the file.
This simple enhancement ensures that your projects remain consistent and compatible with the newest features and improvements, streamlining the update process and saving you time.
SQL Notebook: reusing a connection over multiple cells
Another exciting update in our recent release is an enhancement to SQL Notebooks. We've enabled SQL Notebook providers to reuse a single connection across multiple cells.
Now, each cell won't need to create its own connection, which means better performance and a smoother user experience for you. This optimization also results in more efficient resource utilization, as connections won't be unnecessarily duplicated.
You can now work seamlessly across cells using the same connection until you manually close it or switch to another one.
Support for multitenancy in SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) and SAP Build Code
Next, I have some great news for developers! Both, SAP BAS and SAP Build Code are now supporting multi-tenancy.
Developers can use BAS to build and deploy database artifacts directly into specific database tenants. The project explorer has been enhanced to allow easy binding to various services within a Cloud Foundry space, including HDI containers, application-managed services, and user-provided service instances. Please note that the project explorer only allows binding to HDI tenant containers.
This update not only strengthens multitenancy support but also simplifies the binding process, making your development workflow more efficient and straightforward.
Supporting additional database artifacts in development projects
Furthermore, we have expanded support for additional database artifact types in the developer tools available in BAS. Developers can now work with Fabric virtual tables (.hdbfabricvirtualtable), Structured filters (.hdbstructuredfilter), and Collection adjacency indexes (.hdbcollectionadjindex) seamlessly. These new artifact types are fully supported in both the database artifact creation wizard and the text editors.
These additions improve the integration, simplify project setup, and ultimately boost developer productivity, making it easier for developers to work with a wider range of database artifacts.
If you've made it to this point, congratulations! You've successfully explored our entire What's New blog post—great job!
If you are looking for more technical details on the Q1 2025 release, please visit our What’s New Viewer in the Technical documentation, which provides a comprehensive overview of the release scope. To stay up-to-date on the latest developments and news in and around SAP HANA Cloud, be sure to follow the SAP HANA Cloud tag.
Furthermore, you can check out new blog posts using the #whatsnewinsaphanacloud hashtag. In case you missed the What’s New webinar from Q4 2024, you can find it along with future webinars in this YouTube playlist. Stay tuned for our upcoming webcast on the latest innovations, which will be added to the same playlist shortly.
If you have any questions about SAP HANA Cloud or would like to discuss the mentioned innovations, please post them in our SAP HANA Cloud Community Q&A or in the comments section below!
Cheers!
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