The biggest highlights in big data these past seven days included a couple of major announcements from SAP and Jaspersoft, as well as a big milestone for the NoSQL community and even bigger funding round for Continuuity.

In addition to launching new solutions and adding Windows 8 support to a few of its existing BI apps, SAP announced service pack stack 5 for HANA. The upcoming update will introduce a few major improvements to the in-memory analytics platform, including compatibility with SAP ERP and more features for large-scale deployments that simplify data management and configuration.

Jaspersoft, an enterprise big data vendor, released the 5^th version of its flagship product this week. The main addition is native data visualization: users can now view the information they process with Jaspersoft from within the program. Version 5.0 also includes support for a broader range of database solutions and integration with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.

The VC community showed some noteworthy progress as well. In particular, Ignition Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and 3 other high-profile Silicon Valley investors injected $10 million into Continuuity, the company behind AppFabric. The solution is pegged as a cloud-based production environment for data-driven apps, and rightfully so thanks to the niche resources that it offers to developers who sign up to the services.

10gen, the startup behind the MongoDB NoSQL database, also had some good news last week: t announced a strategic investment from Intel Capital and Red Hat. The two firms each have their eyes set on the big data space, and allying with one of the leading vendors in this space allows for an initial foothold.

10gen did not specify what may come out of these partnerships in the future, but it did say that it plans to re-invest the newly acquired funds in R&D and marketing.