Tuesday 4 October 2016

How to Install the Automated Predictive Library in SAP HANA

Having recently installed the the new Automated Predictive Library (APL), the former KXEN Infinite Insight Libraries inside HANA, I wanted to share my experience.

The benefit the APL brings is that we can now utilise the KXEN libraries directly in-memory within the HANA Platform so the data never needs to leave HANA.  These libraries are a core part of Predictive Analytics 2.0 and are found in both the Automated and Expert perspectives within this.  As the name suggests when using the APL we have attempted to automate as much of the predictive process as possible.

With the APL 1.1  the following predictive functions have been included.

  • Classification
  • Regression
  • Clustering
  • Time Series
  • Key Influencers

The APL is actually contained within Predictive Analytics 2.0 download, so first you will need to download that component first.



The pre-requisits for the APL are

1. SAP HANA SP 9 or above - I used HANA revision 92
2. unixODBC - I downloaded and compiled from the source here.  I won't repeat the instructions as they are very clear at http://www.unixodbc.org/
3. AFL SDK  1.00.090 - I don't believe you need to install this as it already comes with HANA


Once unixODBC is installed you should find it in /usr/local/lib as shown below


As shown in the APL documentation on page7, you need to create a symbolic link for libodbc.so.1 such as

ln –s libodbc.so.2 libodbc.so.1

Now you need to add the /usr/local/lib to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:/usr/local/lib

For me the easiest way to know this was in place was to add it to the hdbenv.sh, Warning this may not be the correct place to edit, but it worked for me.



The APL install itself is very easy, just upload and extract the TGZ file and then launch hdbinst as root.  The file I uploaded was from the full PA 2.0 download and called "SAPPAAPL2000_0.TGZ"

mo-dad69e91a:/tmp/apl-1.1.0.20-linux_x64/installer # ls -l
total 28
-rwxr-xr-x 1 30003 shadow 19128 Nov 20 22:01 hdbinst
drwxr-xr-x 5 root  root    4096 Feb 12 13:57 instruntime
drwxr-xr-x 2 root  root    4096 Feb 12 13:57 packages
mo-dad69e91a:/tmp/apl-1.1.0.20-linux_x64/installer # ./hdbinst

Enter your SYSTEM ID and credentials and the APL will be installed, HANA will be restarted to allow the install to complete.
That is the software installed you now need to configure it by running the supplied SQL scripts.

If you navigate to the extracted TGZ location you should see samples/sql and in here you can open the apl_admin.sql as shown


In here there is some "sample" SQL code to use :-)

You need to enable the HANA ScriptServer if it is not already running within your environment - either directly via SQL or in HANA Studio at Admin Console, Configuration, daemon.ini

alter system alter configuration ('daemon.ini', 'SYSTEM') set ('scriptserver', 'instances') = '1' with reconfigure;

With that running you should now be able to check the APL is installed correctly, all of the APL function statements should return APL related rows such as shown below

How to Install the Automated Predictive Library in SAP HANA


How to Install the Automated Predictive Library in SAP HANA


How to Install the Automated Predictive Library in SAP HANA

How to Install the Automated Predictive Library in SAP HANA

Source: scn.sap.com

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