SAP Launches HANA 2 And Developer-Focused Cloud Microservices

SAP has launched HANA 2, an overhaul of its core in-memory database platform which adds a more developer focused tint to the system that underpins many of the company’s services.

HANA 2 contains tweaks to database management tool to better handle and secure workloads on the platform and offer more administrative features, as well as better data management capabilities such as enhanced enterprise modelling, data integration and tired storage.

For developers, HANA 2 offers new algorithms for embedding analytical intelligence into applications that work on crunching text, spatial, streaming and graph data. These include algorithms for classification, association, time series and regression for use with predictive analytics and machine learning in apps.

Developers will also have access to tools with new application programing interfaces (APIs) that can allow software makers to extract more meta data from documents for analysis or have enhanced functions for application servers and languages.

SAP HANA Microservices for developers

While HANA 2 appears to be mostly an iterative update of its core platform, SAP also announced HANA Microservcies in the cloud.  

As the name would suggest these are small pieces of cloud-hosted software or specific data streams, based on top of HANA 2, which can be plugged into applications using simple APIs and what SAP claims is any language or development platform.

These microservices allow developers to simply add more data crunching and streaming features into their software and platforms without the need to build them from scratch.

The microservices will be delivered through SAP’s Hybris-as-a-service, another cloud service now offered by the German database giant which provides a marketplace and effectively a mini ecosystem for microservices to give developers easy access to bits of software from which they can assemble their own business and commerce products and services.

Currently the microservices SAP is championing are ones for several forms of text data processing aimed at apps that make use of natural language processing, and a microservice developed with the European Space Agency, which allows satellite data to be used with HANA’s spatial processing to enable workloads such as the analysis of environmental conditions and to workout  good times to plant crops.

SAP HANA 2 is due for release on November 30, with the company planning to add more microservices into the mix.

While SAP works to boost its core database services, it also has a weather eye on the Internet of Things (IoT) having recently committed £1.7 billion to a five-year push into the IoT arena.

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