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Free SAP HANA for everyone. What are you waiting for?

Many of you should, by now, have already heard of SAP HANA, the in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system of SAP. The benefits of this in-memory platform are tremendous, but due to the SAP HANA price tag, not cut out for all to use or fiddle around (aka execute a proof of concept) with. To overcome this hurdle and make SAP HANA available ‘for the masses’, SAP recently launched SAP HANA, Express Edition.

SAP HANA Express Edition is a streamlined version of SAP HANA that can run on laptops and other resource-constrained hosts (such as a  NUC) for free up to 32G of memory use.

Via SAP HANA Express Edition a binary installer or pre-configured virtual machine image (ova file) version of SAP HANA express edition can be downloaded.

Because the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I’ve downloaded and installed a virtual machine image of SAP HANA express edition on my laptop myself last weekend. Following all steps of the “Getting Started HANA express VM” manual, which is part of the download package, makes the installation a piece of cake.

When the installation is finished and the (SAP HANA express edition) virtual machine is up and running, your SAP HANA system is granted an IP address within the range of your own private/home network (usually starting with 192.168). In this example, the SAP HANA express edition is reachable via 192.168.113.215 as to be seen in the screengrab below

The next step is to connect HANA Studio (or in my case Eclipse) to the locally running version of SAP HANA Express Edition. Because there are many tutorials out there which provide a detailed scenario on how to add a new HANA system, I won’t go into detail. As to be seen in the screengrab, a live connection has been established with SAP HANA express edition, reachable via IP address 192.168.113.215:

As stated earlier: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. That’s why a final screengrab has been added which clearly shows that a live connection has been established because the table content of randomly chosen table “ACTIVATION_HELPER2” is clearly depicted on the right side of the screen. (32 rows have been retrieved and are shown)

As of today, SAP HANA (Express Edition) can be in the palm of your hand; A free developer version of SAP HANA express edition is available and waiting for you! What are you waiting for?

Feel free to contact McCoy for more info regarding SAP HANA or SAP HANA Express Edition.