The April 2026 release of Data Ingestion and Replication includes the following changed behavior.
Empty strings no longer replicated as NULL to Databricks targets
For application ingestion and replication tasks and database ingestion and replication tasks that have a Databricks target, empty strings ("") in a source string column now remain as empty strings in the target. Previously, any empty string in the source data was incorrectly replicated as NULL to the Databricks target.
With the new logic, a new default null marker is used. If a source string column contains NULL data, the data is replicated as infa_null in the Databricks staging file CSV format option. Data Ingestion and Replication interprets any occurrence of infa_null as an actual NULL in the target table.
To enable the behavior for new tasks created from the current release, set the writerEmptyStringsAsNulls=false custom property on the Task Details target page of the task configuration wizard.
For existing tasks and tasks deployed in earlier versions, set the writerEmptyStringsAsNulls=false and disableWriterDatabricksEmptyHandling=false custom properties on the Task Details target page of the task configuration wizard. Then redeploy the task.
SAP HANA Log-based CDC support for update SPS08
Database ingestion and replication jobs that use Log-based CDC can now process SAP HANA 2.x SPS08 sources. To use SPS08, the database ingestion and replication user must have read access to the SYS.M_SYSTEM_OVERVIEW system monitoring view. This view is required to fetch system overview information, such as the SAP HANA database version, that's needed to detect some changes in the structure of the binary files that SPS08 introduced. Without this information, jobs might encounter file-parsing failures or data discrepancies due to the incorrect parsing of data.
Improved processing of Db2 for z/OS compensation records
Previously, if database ingestion and replication incremental load or combined load jobs with a Db2 for z/OS source encountered unneeded Db2 compensation records in the log, a slowdown in CDC processing might occur. Now, CDC handling of compensation records is more efficient. Instead of removing the compensation log records at the end of the UOW, Database Ingestion and Replication stores the compensation records as key:value pairs in a hash map, which allows these records to be ignored when the log data is released to the log parser.