UPDATED 03:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 08 2016

APPS

What’s new in SAP Hana 2 database: satellite data and cloud analytics

Attendees of SAP SE’s TechEd conference in Barcelona this week will have plenty to talk about between sessions.

The company kicked off the event today by unveiling a landmark new release of Hana, the in-memory database underpinning its core products, that aims to streamline every major aspect of running an analytics environment. On the backend, SAP has augmented the system’s management interface with features such as the ability to offload access requests from a deployment to secondary servers in the event of a usage spike. And for analysts, Hana 2 introduces an extensive set of business intelligence features designed to help them make better use of their companies’ information.

The arguably biggest addition on the latter front is a specialized version of PowerDesigner, SAP’s data modeling toolkit, that has been adapted to run on the database. It allows analysts teams to map out the records inside Hana and make them easily access for business workers who can’t execute complex queries on their own. Users with more niche requirements, meanwhile, can take advantage of eight new pre-built machine algorithms that are rolling out in conjunction. SAP says that they’re designed to automate complex tasks such as pattern recognition and machine learning that previously required a great deal of custom code to implement.

Many of the same capabilities are also available in Hana Cloud Microservices, a set of new managed analytics services that company is introducing alongside the updated on-premise release. It’s similar to IBM Corp.’s Watson Developer Cloud suite in the sense that organizations can pick and choose which capabilities of the platform they wish to buy. On launch, SAP’s toolkit features a trio of text analysis tools and a satellite data service developed in collaboration with the European Space Agency.

The latter offering provides access to soil readings, oceanic data and a wide variety of other geospatial information collected from orbit. It should appeal to companies with international chains that can be heavily influenced by global events, as well as financial firms looking to make more informed stock bets. And environmental organizations could potentially employ the service, too, for activities such as monitoring vulnerable ecosystems.

The final component of today’s announcement is Hana Express, a slimmed-down version of the database that SAP releasing for free. The software allows potential customers to test out the system’s capabilities before committing to the paid version, while enabling application teams to easily set up development environments where they can run their projects. It puts a 32-gigabyte cap on workloads’ memory consumption that organizations have the option of increasing to as much as 128 gigabytes for an added fee.

Image via SAP

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