Long time without writing anything in the blog and a lot of things have changed during this time. I wanted to talked about BW/4HANA but it seems SAP have a bigger and more important surprise: SAP HANA 2!

It is time to move, it is time for HANA 2

During the last SAP Teched celebrated in Barcelona SAP decided to announce to the whole world the new release of SAP HANA. We are not talking about a minor release or patch such a Support Package. It is a whole new version name HANA 2 which changes a lot of things on HANA. Knowing this we need to consider several things..

What is new in SAP HANA 2

For answering these question we can take a look to the FAQ About SAP HANA2. The new features in SAP HANA 2 are:

• Improvements in database management: High-availability, security, workload management and administration enhancements.
• Improvements in data management:Take advantage of the data no matter where it comes from. This mean better data integration, data quality, enterprise modeling and dynamic tiering.
• Analytical Intelligence: New algorithms for working with the data so we will see new patterns withing the data. New database engine for working with data.
• Application development: Develop new applications will be easier and more powerful. It will also be possible to extract data or metadata from the documents using a new API.

How do I get SAP HANA 2? I want SAP HANA 2!

For those of you who wants the new SAP HANA 2 the process to upgrade to the new version is quite easy. You only need to have the current SAP HANA database in SPS 10/11/12 and upgrade from that version to SAP HANA 2:

Moving to SAP HANA 2 is not a database migration. I remark this because is just an upgrade and you won’t have to migration your database to the new version. This is really important because migrating to SAP HANA from a conventional database is a pain in the ass, it takes a lot of time and effort. Specially if you did your migration some years ago when the current tool set wasn’t released.

In the following image you can see the different ways to upgrade and the supported OS versions:

If you don’t want to upgrade to SAP HANA 2 you don’t have to. SAP HANA SPS 12 will be supported until May 2019. SAP won’t release new Support Package to SAP HANA database.

Wait a minute… To whom do I have to sell my soul?

There is a small downside when upgrading to HANA 2: You will have to upgrade your database yearly. SAP will release 2 SPS every year for the new version and the support for the database will be related to the patch level you have installed. SAP will only support the current version minus 2 SPS. For example, if your database have SPS 00 installed SAP will support it until SPS02 is released.

This is not a bad thing by itself since the best practices of database administration say we should patch our database as often as possible (I consider 1 year is too much).

I want it! When can I get it?

SAP HANA 2 is expected be RTC (Released to Customer) on November 30th 2016. This means we will have a new version on only 2 days! Stay tuned and be ready for the new SAP HANA release in a couple of days!