Modern business applications present a wide range of requirements to database management systems. This ranges from big data processing applications that routinely deal with petabytes of data, over transactional processing systems with low-latency requirements, to HTAP and multi-model systems with highly diverse query workloads and data types. With the shift to cloud-based infrastructure, the expectations of applications have only increased. This includes high-availability across regions, vertical and horizontal scalability, serverless deployments, seamless integration across different data management solutions, security features such as customer-managed encryption keys, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), to only name a few.

In this talk, we discuss how a modern database management system can tackle these requirements using SAP HANA Cloud as a running example. We highlight how to give applications the opportunity to pick the right cost/performance tradeoffs for their data management challenges, deal with the security and isolation requirements of hundreds of thousands of tenants, and dynamically scale the system in case of load spikes of workload shifts.

Alexander Böhm is a Distinguished Engineer at SAP and one of the chief architects for the SAP HANA database management system. His specific focus is on system performance and core database topics. He drives strategic, tactical, and operational projects, including design and architectural changes of the database kernel for key stakeholders, i.e. SAP S/4HANA.

Additionally, he is overseeing the evolution of the HANA core database management system with respect to novel hardware and technology as well as cloud-based system deployments. Before re-joining SAP in 2024, Alexander was a Principal Engineer at Google Cloud and the Uber-Techlead for Google's AlloyDB for PostgreSQL system.