HANA may organize data in rows and columns like traditional relational systems, but that’s not stopping SAP SE from going after customers’ unstructured information with the new release of the in-memory platform that debuted this morning. Service Pack 11 introduces enhanced natural language processing functionality for extracting details from documents and geospatial analytics to help address the rapid rise of location-based services, which are becoming an operational staple in many of the segments that the software giant targets.

Companies in the retail sector, for instance, are increasingly relying on geofencing to promote brick-and-mortar stores, while location analysis has assumed an even more important part in the work of public safety organizations tasked with combating major hazards. HANA SP11 offers to simplify both use cases with a set of new mapping conveniences including the ability to find every addresses in a given radius based on specific criteria. The addition holds the potential to make dealing with situations like the ongoing E. coli scare at Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc much easier by enabling analysts to quickly locate every store that has received a shipment from the suppliers suspected of delivering contaminated produce.

The capability is joined by an automatic triangulation function and support for the Open Geospatial Consortium’s namesake data standard that will enable customers to use the features introduced as part of the update with records from any external system that meets the specification. HANA SP11 will support the new use cases that SAP hopes will be spurred by the upgrade with a series of equally significant architectural changes that promise to help make large-scale implementations much more efficient.

The native application server in HANA used to run analytic processes on top has been decoupled from the data management components to allow for workloads to scale independently of the underlying relational store and thus reduce licensing costs. Operational overhead expenses can be further reduces with a new storage automation engine that makes it possible to automatically move records to the most economic medium as operational conditions change. Administrators also have the option of replicating those records continuously replicated to a standby deployment of the database that is able to quickly take over the reins in the event of a problem with the primary cluster.

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