SAP's in-memory database, SAP HANA, has changed how companies manage their landscapes and workflows. Managing your data in-memory allows for more efficient data access, and it noticeably improves performance. It also allows for reducing data redundancy, by accessing SAP views instead of index tables like SAP ERP's BSIS and BSAS.
What hasn't changed is the need to perform several maintenance activities on the database, one of the main ones being frequently updating to the latest patch available. SAP releases revisions for SAP HANA to solve known problems, like memory leaks or database crashes, and it sometimes also fixes more severe errors like queries returning wrong results. These corrections come in the form of maintenance revisions, and as of this writing, the latest supported revisions are HANA 2.00.059.06 and 2.00.065.00.
The first one corresponds to SAP HANA 2 Support Package Stack 05 (SPS05), which is a long-term support release and will be patched until the end of 2025, but only with bug fixes - it will not receive any new features. All further development will continue in HANA 2 SPS06 and beyond, with features that weren't available before such as native backup compression, and support for exporting or importing data directly from cloud providers. Depending on your company's needs, you will have to decide what version to upgrade to.
SAP HANA 1 is now out of support, having received its last update, SPS12 revision 122.35, in April 2021. If you are still on HANA 1, you need to plan an upgrade to HANA 2 to continue receiving support from SAP, and to benefit from the new features and enhancements available in the new releases. This upgrade might have dependencies on your operating system and SAP application versions, so this project could take some time.
Using a recently released revision helps ensure you have the latest software fixes, so you should plan on updating at least twice a year. If you need some assistance with this technical project, contact us to see how we can help.