Thursday 29 December 2016

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 00 What’s New: Administration – by the SAP HANA Academy

Introduction

We will be posting new videos to the SAP HANA Academy to show new features and functionality introduced with SAP HANA 2.0 Support Package Stack (SPS) 00.

Tutorial Video

Tuesday 27 December 2016

Input parameter based on procedure of type Date

Use case: The user is asked to enter a date. If nothing is specified then it should be default to first day of the current month else user specified value should be used to filter the data, using Graphical calculation view.

If you are thinking to do by using Input parameter with “Derived from Procedure/Scalar function”
then you are almost there with just 2 hurdles to cross.

For this demonstration I’m using the below table structure for which the field
DOJ is of type DATE on which the input parameter will be used.

Port of Antwerp from the Opendata challenge perspective – part 4

In the last part (part 3), we saw how to import a CSV file into HANA using HANA Studio where we converted the geoJSON filed into WKT, let’s now see how we can take care of the same content but in a JSON format.
if you remember, our CSV file (http://datasets.antwerpen.be/v4/gis/grondwaterstroming.csv) is also available in JSON format.

So the link to our JSON content is: http://datasets.antwerpen.be/v4/gis/grondwaterstroming.json, this will only return the first thousand rows (and luckily this has only 123 rows, but I will show you how to implement the pagination).

Saturday 24 December 2016

Port of Antwerp from the Opendata challenge perspective – part 3

In the last part (part 2), we saw how to import a CSV file into HANA using HANA Studio, let’s now see how we can take care of the geometry column.
If you want to learn more about geoJSON, you can check the following website: http://geojson.org/

if you remember, our CSV file (http://datasets.antwerpen.be/v4/gis/grondwaterstroming.csv) has a field named “geometry” which is a geoJSON stream.

As stated before HANA does support this format yet with the proper ST_GEOMETRY data type constructor or constructor. So we will need to convert this field to a “Well-Known Text” format.

Friday 23 December 2016

Port of Antwerp from the Opendata challenge perspective – part 2

Now that we have our HANA instance up and running in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform trial platform as described in part 1 of this blog series, we can now start importing CSV like type of data.

This dataset is available in different format: CSV, JSON, XML, KML and MAP.

Step 1: Download and explore the file locally

Open the following URL and save the file locally: http://datasets.antwerpen.be/v4/gis/grondwaterstroming.csv

Open the file with a text editor like Notepad++ or Textpad or any text editor that you are used to. It only contains 123 rows.

Thursday 15 December 2016

Enterprise Readiness with SAP HANA – Persistence, Backup & Recovery

Enterprise Readiness – Planning Your Data Center

As High Availability and Disaster Recovery become increasingly important topics for many enterprise customers embarking on digitization, we will be taking time to explain more on this topic in a blog series to help customers better plan and prepare their data center operations, with SAP HANA as the platform of focus.

We began this series with an earlier blog on Enterprise Readiness, and will continue with more topics in the following months.

Wednesday 14 December 2016

Enterprise Readiness with SAP HANA

Data Centers as the “Power Plants” of the digital Economy

Data centers are the power plants of today’s businesses. However, planning high availability into a system landscape may often be an overlooked aspect by some businesses. As more elements ranging from devices, people, equipment and other systems become increasingly connected, the costs after an unplanned outage is definitely becoming more significant. In the always-on digital economy, companies that rely on data to make decisions, conduct transactions, and interact with consumers cannot afford data center blackouts.

Tuesday 13 December 2016

Port of Antwerp from the Opendata challenge perspective – part 1

Getting Access to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform trial platform

Here is how to register for a developer/trial account: Sign up for an free trial account on SAP HANA Cloud Platform

This should not take you more than 5 minutes to receive the account activation link and get to the HCP Cockpit. You will be assigned a “P” user id (unless you have an SAP account already and you want to use it with your “S” user id).

Make the new standalone HANA 2 Cockpit work for you

After installing my first HANA 2 system, I realized that the HANA Cockpit is no longer an integral part of the database instance as it was with HANA 1, as is clearly stated in the HANA Cockpit Installation and Update Guide:

Make the new standalone HANA 2 Cockpit work for you

Saturday 10 December 2016

EHP upgrade and HANA migration. Lessons learnt

The system was based on SAP EHP Release 7.01 running on an Oracle database that had over 8.7 Terabytes. Additionally, the pre-existing landscape and the target one are hosted on premises, under virtual servers on vSphere 6.0. Software  wise, our customer system is based on Vehicle Management System (IS-A-VMS), although with a significant amount of customizations and custom code.

The original motivation to initiate this project followed an analysis of the usage of the system, and based on our predictions of additional data volume, additional markets, etc. it was quite clear that we needed to take some measures to keep the response times within reasonable limits. Furthermore, it was quite obvious that HANA was the future for SAP based systems, so at some point we would have had to contemplate a migration.

Friday 9 December 2016

Dynamic filter / User Exit Variable for HANA Views

Requirement : Based on user input or current month , we want to restrict data in our view.  Common requirement is to show last 12/13 months data dynamically. In general , we want to go 'n' number of months back from current month or whatever month user would select.

Solution :  From  SPS09 , HANA allows Input Parameter of type   "Derived From Procedure /Scalar Function" - and I would use this to meet this requirement. Good thing about this solution is , we can restrict the data at the first projection node and avoid bringing unnecessary data to upper nodes.  We shall write a procedure which would take month input from user ( or current month if nothing supplied)  and return  "to" and "from" month.

Thursday 8 December 2016

Upgrade your HANA, express edition to HANA 2

  1. Temporarily increase memory to 23.9 GB
  2. Create temporary user
  3. Uninstall HANA 1
  4. Install HANA 2
  5. Install AFL
In order to allow for the upgrade to HANA 2, I have to temporarily increase the memory of my virtual machine to 23.9 GB as before:

Wednesday 7 December 2016

Using Synonyms in SAP HANA

In this blog post I try to explain what synonyms are and how they work in HANA SQL, but most of it will apply to other databases as well.

Use Case, Users and Schemas

Lets consider the following use case:
  • One user (SYN_PROV) creates/owns DB objects like tables, and provides access to its objects via synonyms. That could be e.g. a replicated ERP Schema.

Monday 5 December 2016

Enable Operational Process Intelligence on your HANA, express edition

With the HANA Rules Framework (HRF) in my blog, I was wondering whether I could move my HANA, express edition to the next level and enable Operational Process Intelligence (OPI) that needs HRF as a prerequisite.

As it turned out, this was again quite straight forward:
  1. Download and install the delivery units
  2. Configure OPI
  3. Install Eclipse Business Scenario and Workflow Editor plugins
  4. Model Business Scenario

Saturday 3 December 2016

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 00 What’s New: Security – by the SAP HANA Academy

Encryption

Data volume encryption was introduced with SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 09. With 2.0, log volume encryption is now also supported. You enable log volume encryption using SQL. Data volume encryption can also be enabled using the new SAP HANA cockpit.

Friday 2 December 2016

SAP HANA and BW Mixed Scenarios Architecture

What is a Data Warehouse Mixed Architecture?

It’s an SAP best practice for modern data warehousing. Simply put, it’s a data model that is implemented at the same time in SAP BW and native SAP HANA.

SAP HANA and BW Mixed Scenarios Architecture

Thursday 1 December 2016

Enable the HANA Rules Framework on your HANA, express edition

With SDI in the bag, I was wondering whether I could enable the HANA Rules Framework (HRF) on my HANA, express edition in a similar way.

As it turned out, this was also absolutely possible and if fact quite straight forward as well:
  1. increase the virtual machine memory to 12GB
  2. Create a tenant database
  3. Enable HTTP and HTTPS access to the tenant database
  4. Import the HRF delivery unit
  5. Set Up a Technical User