At SAP SE’s annual user conference in Florida this week, data management is dominating the agenda. The company is showcasing a new version of Hana that makes it possible to identify relationships between the records in a deployment without having to use an external graph store.

The addition thereby avoids the bandwidth cost of regularly moving information between two separate database environments, which can add up quickly for the large organizations that SAP is targeting. And Hana also reduces administrative overhead in the process by removing the need to maintain an ETL pipeline to handle the transfer of records. The potential labor savings increase even further when accounting for the graph database on the receiving end of the workflow and the effort required to manage its various components, most notably the underlying hardware.

Yet for all its benefits, the new functionality probably can’t substitute a dedicated graph database in every use case. Hana is at its core a columnar store optimized for relational records, while specialized alternatives like Neo4j have been created from the ground up to find relationships in unstructured information. However, the upgrade is enough to level the playing field against Oracle Corp., which has long offered a similar graph processing module for its competing relational system.

The vendors also share a focus on hybrid cloud use cases, which are becoming increasingly common as companies become more comfortable with moving their data outside the firewall. To address the trend, SAP plans on complementing the new iteration of Hana with a set of management tools aimed at making it easier for users to take advantage of infrastructure-as-a-service resources. Only one of the upcoming additions has been announced at the event so far: A testing engine that is able to create an off-premise copy of a deployment for simulating configuration changes before they’re rolled out to production.

For more insight into SAP’s plans, check out SiliconANGLE’s live stream from Sapphire Now 2016. Marc Geall, the executive overseeing the development of cloud services for Hana, is one of the many company insiders who are scheduled to drop by our mobile studio over the next two days.

Image via Geralt