A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to discuss with a customer different options to evolve his SAP BW on Hana from pure BW scenarios to mixed scenarios (BW+Hana) and even native (Hana); among other things, the topic of the types of licenses that existed for Hana and what could be done with each of them or what license was needed for each case came up.
For your information, here is a summary of the types of Hana licensing currently available.
SAP HANA RUNTIME EDITION
This license includes SAP Hana as a database to support the use of the application (runtime), so any functionalitythat Hana can provide (native) can always be used through the application layer. An example would be BW on Hana or BW4HANA where we take advantage of the speed (RAM + multicore CPU + columnar) but through BW objects optimized for Hana.
Runtime licensing metrics
The metric is the number of users of the SAP application that has been purchased and additionally a percentage of the above amount is paid as a license for Hana, so that it can only be used as a database for the product in question.
SAP HANA FULL EDITION
This type of license allows you to use native Hana functionality and we have several types:
- SAP Hana Standard Edition: Allows licensing the following components:
- Database Services.
- Integration Services.
- Application Services.
- SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering.
- SAP HANA Accelerator for SAP ASE.
- SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer, edition for SAP HANA.
- SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by SAP HANA.
- SAP HANA Data Warehousing Foundation.
- SAP Hana Enterprise Edition: Includes the following components in addition to the Standard Edition:
- SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) and SAP MaxDB.
- SAP HANA Accelerator for SAP ASE.
- SAP HANA, Spatial and Graph Option.
- SAP HANA, Data Privacy Option.
- SAP HANA, Search and Text Option.
- SAP HANA, Information Management Option.
- SAP HANA, Predictive Option.
- SAP HANA predictive analysis library (PAL).
- SAP HANA, Streaming Analytics Option.
- SAP HANA, Data Replication Option.
Interestingly, if you have a Standard Edition license, you can license Enterprise components individually, i.e., in addition to those included in the standard, you can license PAL (Predictive Analysis Library) or Spatial and Graph, for example.
- SAP Hana Active/Active Read-Enabled Option: Enables additional functionality for disaster recovery and allows reporting workloads to be run on a secondary Hana system.
Full Edition licensing metrics
The metric for the Full Edition version is the total amount of RAM used by the database, typically purchased in 64 gb blocks of RAM.
SAP HANA CLOUD SERVICES
It is a Hana platform service managed on SAP Cloud Platform (SCP).
The typologies are analogous to the on premise mentioned above (Standard and Enterprise) although it allows 2 types of contracting.
- Based on consumption or credits: The cost is variable and will depend on the use we make of the service.
- Subscription based: We have a fixed price for the functionality and size in Gb of the Hana service to be contracted.
SAP HANA EXPRESS
Se trata de laversión Community y gratuita hasta 32 gb de RAM, tenemos disponible gran parte de los componentes de la licencia Enterprise, en concreto son los siguientes:
- Database Services
| Feature | SAP HANA, express edition |
| Columnar, ACID compliant store for OLTP and OLAP | Yes (32 GB maximum) |
| Highly Optimized Compression | Yes |
| Multitenant Database Containers | Yes |
| Data Warehouse Foundation | Yes |
| SAP HANA dynamic tiering | No |
| Multiple Hosts/Scale Out | No |
| Backup Recovery | Yes |
| System Replication | Yes |
- Integration Services
| Feature | SAP HANA, express edition |
| Smart Data Access | Yes |
| SAP HANA streaming analytics | Yes |
| Smart Data Integration | Yes |
| Hadoop | Yes |
- Processing Services
| Feature | SAP HANA, express edition |
| Spatial/GIS | Yes |
| Predictive Analytics, R | Yes (PAL, R-Connector) |
| Graph Engine | Yes |
| Fuzzy Text and Fuzzy Text Search | Yes |
| Text Analytics and Data Mining | Yes |
| Smart Data Quality | No |
| Series Data | Yes |
| AFL | Yes |
| Python Client API for machine learning algorithms | Yes (available with SAP HANA, express edition only) |
| R Client API for machine learning algorithms | Yes |
- Application Services
| Feature | SAP HANA, express edition |
| Extended Application Services | Yes |
| CDS | Yes |
| Server-side Javascript | Yes |
| Modeling, Information Composer | Yes |
- Development Tools
| Feature | SAP HANA, express edition |
| HANA Studio | Yes |
| Web Based Development Workbench | Yes |
| SAP Web-IDE | Yes |
- Administration/Security
| Feature | SAP HANA, express edition |
| Monitoring and Troubleshooting | Yes |
| SAP HANA Cockpit | Yes |
| Security | Yes |
| Solution Manager | No |
Referencias
I leave you some links with interesting references that have served as source for the post:
If any doubt, the official recommendation would be to discuss with your trusted partner or SAP (as appropriate) which one best suits your needs.