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HANA Database Migration: Handling Incompatible Changes to Existing Tables
The question schema evolution exists for, asked plainly: how do you restructure a table in a production system that already holds live data. Incompatible changes are the ones CAP's own alter path will not make, which is where this starts.
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Schema evolutionCAPSchema evolutionGetting a model change into a database that already holds data, in every tenant, without losing any of it. Generating the initial schema and migrating one that already holds data are often treated as the same step.
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Sekar Somasundaramauthor
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SAP Developer New, July 3rd 2026SAP Developer New, July 3rd 2026A "Did You Know" segment in this SAP Developer News video walks through schema evolution: CAP's ability to add a new field to an entity, or make a compatible change to an existing one, then redeploy the model with no data loss or manual migration. The rest of the July 2026 episode covers that month's Developer Challenge, a SAP HANA Cloud Q2 release announcement and a UI5 survey call, none explained in substance here.published 2026-07-02
Run and Deploy SAP CAP (Node.js or Java) with PostgreSQL on SAP BTP Cloud FoundryRun and Deploy SAP CAP (Node.js or Java) with PostgreSQL on SAP BTP Cloud FoundryBoth runtimes in one walkthrough, and it stops on schema evolution — which is the reason to read it rather than one of the several other PostgreSQL posts here, since that is where the PostgreSQL story diverges from HANA's and the deploy stops being automatic.TiaXu, published 2023-07-12
Run and Deploy SAP CAP (Node.js or Java) with PostgreSQL on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry
Database connectors has changed twice since this was published, most recently in @sap/cds 10.1.0, 2026-09-07. Affects A recipe, Runnable code.
How I migrated my on-prem xsa cds3+hana solution to cds6+sqliteHow I migrated my on-prem xsa cds3+hana solution to cds6+sqliteThree major CDS versions and a database swap in one move, done to get an old on-premise XSA application running somewhere cheap. The repository is linked, and the interest is in what broke between cds3 and cds6 rather than in the destination.alex_myakinkii, published 2022-08-07
How I migrated my on-prem xsa cds3+hana solution to cds6+sqlite
Database connectors has changed twice since this was published, most recently in @sap/cds 10.1.0, 2026-09-07. Affects Runnable code.
SAP CAP Recent Enhancements the HANA Dev Should Know AboutSAP CAP Recent Enhancements the HANA Dev Should Know AboutThomas Jung walks through CAP features for HANA database developers that landed through late 2021: doc comments in the data model (CDL comments propagated into generated database objects via the package.json cdsc.docs compiler option), and schema evolution reaching general availability in the November 2021 release, using the @cds.persistence.journal annotation and cds.hana.journal settings to generate incremental hdbmigrationtable migration scripts instead of dropping and recreating tables. It also walks through two features outside those two: window functions in view column definitions, added in the December 2021 release, and a beta assert_integrity setting that generates database foreign-key constraints from 1:1 associations and compositions.published 2022-02-15
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