Connecting SAP HANA Express to Spring Boot via Hibernate

September 07, 2025

#1

This guide shows how to connect SAP HANA Express to a Spring Boot application using Hibernate as the JPA provider.

1. Add Dependencies

In pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.sap.cloud.db.jdbc</groupId>
  <artifactId>ngdbc</artifactId>
  <version>2.18.14</version>
</dependency>

Make sure ngdbc.jar is installed in your Maven local repository.

2. Configure application.properties

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:sap://localhost:39015/?databaseName=HXE
spring.datasource.username=SYSTEM
spring.datasource.password=YourPassword
spring.datasource.driver-class-name=com.sap.db.jdbc.Driver

spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=update
spring.jpa.database-platform=org.hibernate.dialect.HANARowStoreDialect

This tells Spring Boot to use Hibernate with SAP HANA.

3. Create Entity

import jakarta.persistence.*;

@Entity
public class Customer {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;
    private String name;
    private String email;

    // getters and setters
}

4. Repository

import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository;

public interface CustomerRepository extends JpaRepository<Customer, Long> {
}

5. Test Hibernate Integration

import org.springframework.boot.*;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.*;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;

@SpringBootApplication
public class DemoApplication {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
    }

    @Bean
    CommandLineRunner run(CustomerRepository repo) {
        return args -> {
            repo.save(new Customer("Alice", "alice@email.com"));
            repo.findAll().forEach(c -> System.out.println(c.getName()));
        };
    }
}

Run with:

mvn spring-boot:run

You should see customer data printed in the console.