SAP Certified Support Associate: SAP HANA - by the SAP HANA Academy

Introduction

Interested in getting certified as official SAP HANA supporter? In this blog, I will explain how you can prepare for the SAP Certified Support Associate - SAP HANA certification exam.

This blog is part of a series.

• SAP Certified Technology Associate - SAP HANA
• SAP Certified Technology Specialist - SAP HANA Installation
• SAP Certified Support Associate: SAP HANA 

About the Certification

The Support Associate certification was introduced with SPS 06 (June 2013). Tim Breitwieser blogged about it at the time on SCN:SAP HANA Certification Program extended with "SAP Certified Support Consultant". In this blog he explained that the exam is "a pre-requisite for VARs to become authorized to deliver support for SAP HANA". For those that have access to SAP PartnerEdge, you can find all information in the Overview Presentation: VAR-Delivered Support for SAP HANA.

Topic Areas

There are 80 questions divided over ten topic areas. Cut score is 60%, which means that you need to answer at least 47 questions correct. Below the different topics and their relative weight. See the C_HANASUP_1 page on the SAP Training and Certification Shop for the specifics.

SAP Hana EIM (SDI/SDQ) setup

In my documentation I’ll explain how to setup and configure SAP Hana SP10 EIM (SDI/SDQ) with Sybase IQ database and ERP on Hana database schema source system to replicated data for realtime data replication.

I will show in detail step and configuration point to achieve it.

In order execution

• Create Sybase IQ database
• Enable DP server for SDI
• Enable Script server for SDQ
• Install SDQ cleanse and geocode directory
• Install DU HANA_IM_DP (Data provisioning)
• Install and Register Data Provisioning Agent
• Create remote source
• Data replication and monitoring

Configuration required on SP9
The xsengine needs to be turn to true (if not done)
The statistic server needs to be turn to true (if not done)
The DU HANA_IM_ESS needs to be imported

How to Setup Hana Authorization Trace

How to activate an Authorization Trace in case of authorization Problems:
(something similar to Transaction ST01 in Netweaver ABAP)

Go to Hana System Administration, Trace Configuration:

User Specific Trace, select New Configuration (small Icon 'Create' upper right Corner of User-Specific Trace)

Getting the Counters right with stacked Calculation Views

Data Modeling in SAP HANA provides great amount of flexibility to the end user. One of the key capabilities in Modeling sector of SAP HANA is computation of user required calculations. One of the variations in calculation which end user can perform in Calculation Views/Analytic Views is 'Counter'.

Let us now understand the operations under the hood when stack of Calculation Views are created in a project.

Consider a simple 'Product Details' table which comprise of the product information along with its sales information as shown below:

Product	Store	Customer	Quantity	Revenue	Unit
Headset	METRO	ALDI	2	120	PACKG
ipad	METRO	ALDI	10	6000	PACKG
ipad	METRO	IBM	10	6000	PACKG
Budweiser	EDEKA	IBM	360	720	BOTTL
Coke	EDEKA	ALDI	260	390	BOTTL
Coke	EDEKA	IBM	250	375	BOTTL
Coke	EBAY	IBM	200	300	BOTTL
Headset	EBAY	IBM	10	600	PACKG
ipad	EBAY	ALDI	10	600	PACKG

Auto Documentation Functionality in HANA Studio

When the user creates Views in HANA Studio under “Contents”, he can automatically generate the documentation about the views. This generated document will have the details about all the view belongs to a package which he selected for Auto Documentation.

The user can invoke the Auto Documentation from three places.

1. Right click Context menu of the Package or the Views
2. On the top right corner of the opened view
3. Quick Launch->Content->Auto Documentation

There are two types of Documents available

Model Details:

This lists the information about the views included

For Eg: In case of Analytical View,

Name of the View, Activation Status, Owner who created, Creation time, Package it belongs to, the Attributes and Measures it has(Private Attribute, Calculated Attribute, Measures, Calculated, Restricted Measure,etc)

This will have a collection of (PDF) files for each View belongs to a package the user selected

SAP HANA SPS 11 What's New: Security - by the SAP HANA Academy

Introduction

In the upcoming weeks we will be posting new videos to the SAP HANA Academy to show new features and functionality introduced with SAP HANA Support Package Stack (SPS) 11.

* What's New with SAP HANA SPS 11 - by the SAP HANA Academy

The topic of this blog is security.

SAP HANA Academy - SAP HANA SPS 11: What's New? - Security - YouTube

Exception aggregation modeling with Graphical Calc view

The business scenario is quite common in the BI reporting. Consider a KPI, required to be calculated at a low level of granularity, but the reporting is required at the higher level of granularity. With the default aggregation behavior of the calc view, the constituents of the Calculated KPI might also be aggregated at the reporting granularity level, resulting in incorrect value for the Calculated KPI.

To elaborate more on this, consider the following data model for the Sales Transaction. The transaction data is captured for Product Sold on a given date in a store. The table structure can be defined as follows:

( STORE_ID    nvarchar(10),  --- Store Id
  PROD_ID    nvarchar(10),  --- Product Id
  PROD_CAT    nvarchar(10),  --- Product Category
  PROD_PRICE  decimal(10,2), --- Product Price
  SOLD_QTY    integer,      --- Product Quantity Sold in a Sales transaction
  TRANS_DATE  nvarchar(8),  --- Sales Transaction Date
  STORE_REG  nvarchar(10)  --- Region in which the Store is located
);

The business rule could be:
The product price may vary each day, hence the Net Sales need to be calculated for the Product Price on the transaction date and Quantity Sold on the day.

How to Install SAP HANA SP11

SAP HANA Installation

Downloading the Installation Software from SMP

Using HDBLCMGUI

How to Extend HANA Live Views

In this blog I will describe how we can extend HANA Live Views

I hope many of you are familiar with HANA Live.
If you are not familiar with HANA Live, then you can refer the below blog:
SAP HANA Live - Real-Time operational reporting | SAP HANA

To extend HANA Live Views we generally make a copy of it and then make changes to it as per our needs.
You can check the document given in the blog mentioned above on how to extend HANA Live Views.

Now SAP has created a new tool called SAP HANA Live Extension Assistant.
Using this tool we can easily extend Reuse Views and Query Views.

Lets start with the Installation of Extension Tool:
First download HANA Content Tools from Service Marketplace and then import Delivery Unit HCOHBATEXTN.tgz

SAP HANA Rules Framework by the SAP HANA Academy

Introduction

In the first two videos, the SAP Community Network, the SAP Help Portal, the SAP Support Portal and the Product Availability Matrix are introduced. Knowing where to find information is critical for success.
 
1. How to install SAP HANA Rules Framework: Delivery Unit

2. How to install SAP HANA Rules Framework: SAP HANA Studio Modeling Tools

How to view Historical Data in SAP DB Control Center

The Historical Data feature in SAP DB Control Center (DCC) collects and stores system health status information. This feature, however, is not automatically enabled. This document will guide you through setting up data capture and different options for data visualization.

Note: This document was originally created by a former colleague of mine, Yuki Ji, in support of a customer engagement initiative regarding the SAP DB Control Center (DCC) product.  To preserve this knowledge, the document was migrated to this space.

The information in this document applies to DCC SP10 or higher.

The purge period of historical data collection needs to be configured according to the capacity of the system hosting DCC and the number of systems being monitored. Relation between systems monitored and space needed can be found in the DCC documentation. Otherwise to enable historical data and configure purging requires only two SQL statements to be run.

Hana Modeler: Impact Analysis and Refactoring of Calculation Views

Modeling SAP HANA Calculation Views is the key approach to successfully exploit the power of the SAP HANA Platform and leverage key SAP HANA capabilities. In the meantime there exist many features that help to change and refactor calculation views. We will summarize and outline these features in the following:

All the features are available with SP10. Many of them are already available in earlier support packages.

Note: The blog contains a lot of quite large screen shots. If these appear blurred click on them to see a version with a higher resolution!

Impact Analysis and Lineage

First you probably want to get an overview what impact you change might have.

Where used list

To invoke the where used list in the SAP Hana Systems view below the content node choose "Context Menu -> Where-Used" on any calculation view (attribute and analytic views work as well). You will see the impacted views in the Where-Used List view:

How to Plan for Disaster Recovery with SAP HANA

Abstract
As devices, systems, and networks become more complex, there are simply more things that can go wrong due either to man-made or natural disasters. See the options available with SAP HANA for disaster recovery that help organizations keep business running smoothly in such circumstances.

Key Concept
SAP HANA provides a single platform to extract and analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in real time from multiple sources such as social media, blogs, online reviews, emails, and discussion forums. The analyzed information helps customer to answer specific questions, increase revenue, and make accurate and timely decisions. The analyzed information and the data that is accumulated over the years is the backbone for an organization. If something happens to the data due to natural or man-made disasters, business can come to a halt. Making use of the SAP HANA disaster recovery features can save companies from such an outcome.

Learning Objectives
By reading the article you will be able to:

• Understand the concept of disaster recovery
• Understand the disaster recovery options with SAP HANA

Nowadays most every company has its business continuity plan that helps during an unfortunate event such as flood or earthquake. A disaster recovery plan is part of business continuity plan focusing mainly on the restoration of IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis.

There are two important terms when it comes to a disaster recovery plan: recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Disaster recovery concepts

How to Update SAP HANA to SPS10 - Step to Follow

Updating HANA to SPS10

Starting point                                                                                                                     
This time, now the SPS10 is GA, I will update from SPS9 to SPS10.
Here is my source version :

The target is the one available on the market place at the time going :

How SAP HANA and Internet of Things Works Togather with Cloud Platform

With Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) we are facing two trends of which each one for itself has the potential to change the whole IT industry. Recently, these two trends are being combined in IoT device clouds enabling businesses to efficiently collect data from the Internet of Things and manage devices that connect things to the Internet.

The advantage of such device clouds over classical Machine-to-Machine (M2M) telemetry solutions is that they connect potentially any kind of device to a consistent, well-managed, centralized storage in the cloud from where any application can uniformly access the data collected from the devices and things respectively.  In contrast, classical M2M solutions tended to build vertical silos as they typically connected a specific type of device to a certain application often using proprietary technology.

How to Capture Multi-valued Attributes in HANA Table?

SAP HANA is well known for its proficient Architecture along with hardware and software optimizations. With hardware optimization SAP HANA database allows the developer/user to specify whether a table is to be stored column-wise or row-wise.

As an extension to the existing features of column table in HANA, user can now define the columns in a way to make it store multi-values or Array of values.

This document helps in understanding of how to define and work with Multi-Valued Attributes/Columns.

To understand the same let us consider a simple example of storing personal details of an Employee in a single table.

Step 1 : Create a column table that helps to store Employee ID, Employee Firstname, Employee Lastname and Employee Phone details. Former 3 details in the table are considered to have Single Value for each Employee, where as Phone details can be a Multi-Valued column for each Employee. That means, each Employee can have more than one phone details. Thus to make sure the table structure suffice the need to store multiple phone details for each Employee in same column of the table, we must define 'Phone' column in the table as Multi-Valued or Array column as shown below:

CREATE COLUMN TABLE Employee (

      ID int PRIMARY KEY,

      Firstname VARCHAR(20),

      Lastname VARCHAR(20),

      Phone VARCHAR(15) ARRAY --WITHOUT DUPLICATES

)

'Without Duplicates' condition implies that storage of same phone number more than once in the array list is not allowed.

Restrictions for SAP HANA Connectors

Validity

For the MX_VALID_FROM user attribute, take into account that, if the valid from date for the user is earlier than the current date, the user is provisioned to the SAP HANA system with a validity from the current date. This limitation comes from the SAP HANA system, in which you cannot create a user with a validity starting in the past.

Password Provisioning

If an administrator sets a productive password in the Identity Management system, the user also has to configure it in the SAP HANA system. For more information, see the SAP HANA Platform documentation.

Privilege Grouping

Since no multiple assignments are possible in the SAP HANA system, the SAP HANA Connector in the Identity Management system does not support assignment grouping. For this reason, privileges are provisioned to the SAP HANA system separately, but not as a group.

SAP HANA SP100 SDA setup with Apache Hadoop

In my documentation I’ll explain how to setup and configure a SAP Hana SP10 SDA with Apache Hadoop. I will show in detail step and configuration point to achieve this it.

HANA revision 100 reserve a lot new features, refer to the following link for the complete list
SAP Hana SP10 what's new

In order execution

• Apahce Hadooop installation
• Setup Hana to consume Hadoop data
• Connect SAP Hana studio to Hadoop for SDA
• Manage Hadoop Cluster with Ambari

Guide used
Simba ODBC Driver for Apache Hive
HDP installation GuideHANA SDA guide

Note used
2165826 - SAP HANA Platform SPS 10 Release Note
2177918 - SAP HANA Hadoop Ambari Cockpit SP10

Link used
http://hortonworks.com/products/releases/hdp-2-0-ga/#installhttp://www.simba.com/connectors/apache-hadoop-hive-odbchttp://hortonworks.com/products/releases/hdp-2-0-ga/#install

How to Install SAP HANA SPS10 on Red Hat 6.6

In my documentation I’ll explain how to install SAP Hana SP10 on a Linux Red Hat 6.6 system in my test environment.

I will show in detail step and configuration point to achieve it.

For my setup I’ll use my own lab on Vmware Vsphere 5.1.0 and run Hana revision 101, I’ll reuse my existing environment setup in my previous documentation.

In order execution

• Download Red Hat 6.6 release
• Install the minimal RHEL
• Configure RHEL
• SAP Hana installation

SAP HANA - Complete Simplifier Solution

As the lead for SAP’s HANA business in Asia Pacific & Japan, customers constantly ask me how they can accelerate their business processes to meet the demands of a digital economy. A key challenge that resonates with all customers, across various industries, is seeking innovation and tracking results in real time. Traditional databases, unfortunately, have not allowed organizations to meet these demands successfully.

In this post, I’d like to discuss the fundamental problem with traditional databases and highlight why in-memory computing is the only viable option for organizations in a digital economy.

Absurd Complexity – The Fundamental Data Management Problem

The absurd complexity of traditional database systems, proliferated by competitors over the last 40 years, is killing innovation. This is a common problem faced by many organizations across Asia Pacific. While CIOs are aware that delivering innovation is key, the sheer complexity of traditional databases and the costs of “keeping the lights on” deplete their IT budgets and stifles innovation!

In the last month, I met numerous CIOs across Australia, India, Korea and Japan who are forced to manage outdated and complex data infrastructures on traditional database systems. Given the limitations of a traditional database system, CIOs are only able to manage a single business workload at any given time, resulting in massive data duplications and data processing latency.

I recently presented this data management problem at the SAP Forum in Seoul, South Korea. Watch this short video to understand why SAP HANA is so fundamentally different.

Connecting SAP HANA 1.0 to MS SQL Server 2012 for Data Provisioning

There are several Data Provisioning techniques available within SAP HANA. These are "Smart Data Access" (SDA) and "Smart Data Integration" (SDI). Also available is the Hadoop Integration. This Document will cover the connectivity between SAP HANA 1.0 and MS SQL Server 2012 for SDA and SDI.

In the nature of things it is quite tricky to connect a Linux based Application (In our case SAP HANA 1.0) to a Microsoft Windows based Application (In our case MS SQL Server 2012). The official Documentation guides you to the right direction. But, as so often, it tells only half the truth. This Document will show you the rest of the required Information.

1. Prequel
Please find here some Information before we start. These Information are Resources, Guides, Links, etc.

1.1 Exclusion
This Documents excludes the process of installing and configuring SAP HANA and MS SQL Server 2012. Please consult the official documentation for the correct process.

How to Configure SAP HANA RDL (River Definition Language)

1. Introduction

SAP River is a new development language and environment for developing a complete SAP HANA backend application, describing the data model, the business logic and access control within a single, coherent and integrated program specification.
Developing an application using RDL has several key benefits over traditional technologies and development models:

1. Easier and faster development and maintenance:
1. Declarative, focusing on application intent
2. Expressive language constructs
3. Flexible code specification, enabling easier separation of concerns and iterative refinement of application code.
4. Smaller bill of materials – coherency across different layers and components of the application.
2. Easily leveraging HANA’s power, while remaining agnostic to underlying technology containers (XS, SQLScript).
1. Can leverage any underlying supported runtime container, without compromising on running time optimization.
2. Application execution improves together with the underlying technology, transparently; taking advantage of new capabilities.
3. Open to legacy and extension code, in all supported containers.

To enable RDL for HANA developer in HANA, as SAP HANA administrator you have to complete below installation and configuration.

SAP HANA: Achieving Set operations using Joins

Now we can have multiple discussions. As we know that achieving with UNION is better than JOINS. But again it depends on the volumes of the data and the place at which you are applying it.

As per our experiences, we also know that if we can achieve with the help of Attribute /Analytic Views it is better than doing the same with Calculation View Graphical / SQL. In this document i have tried to achieve with Attribute views as much as possible and while doing this i came to know about the Full Outer Join option through graphical models is not possible anymore.

These are 7 questions on which Jody has discussed,

Here are our Tables:

Table 1:

Table 2: 

A Guide to Integrate GRC with SAP HANA

1. PURPOSE

The purpose of this document is to define clear steps required to implement GRC on HANA plug in to integrate GRC 10.1 with HANALIVE DB for user provisioning.

2. SCOPE

This scope applies for Basis team who support SAP GRC on HANA configuration after will go live. This procedure applied for pre requisites, installation and post installation configuration of complete SAP GRC HANA “plug in” setup.
This document does not cover security setup that required for User provisioning on HANALIVE through SAP GRC system

3. Component details

Need at least GRC 10.1 with SAP NW 7.4 system to integrate this with HANA
SAP GRC ACCESS CONTROL  11  sap.com SAP ACCESS CONTROL 10.1
SAP NETWEAVER  7.4 sap.com SAP NET WEAVER 7.4
HANACLIENT SPS 8 Rev 82 Patch level 0
HANALIVE DB SPS8 Rev 82 Patch level 0
HCO_GRC_PI SP06 Patch level 0 (GRC Plugin)

The Science and Art Behind HANA Performance Modeling

During the course of last 2 years, I’ve conducted SAP HANA performance workshops and reviewed information models at various customers. I encounter similar modeling issues or mistakes almost at all customer projects. The good news is that most of the performance problems can be resolved by making with minor changes to the model.

However it is critical to understand the reasons behind the performance problems consistently observed in the HANA implementations. Here are my observations.

1. HANA modelers have pretty good idea on how to build attribute views, analytic views, and calculation views which are part of HANA modeling. However, there is significant gap in the knowledge of using these HANA information views effectively to address the business requirements.
2. Some of the HANA modelers do not have data warehousing background and hence lack the knowledge of basic multi-dimensional analytical reporting, which leads to poor solution design.
3. Modelers and developers seems to have the knowledge of “what works and what does not work”, but they seem to lack the knowledge “Why it is behaving the way it is behaving”, hence the struggle to apply the knowledge effectively while building the models.
4. Finally there is a fundamental flaw in the understanding of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Is performance testing a phase before Go-Live or is it part of unit testing? HANA’s query response is extremely fast for the smaller data set regardless of the modeling approach. This gives a false positive of efficient modeling. The realization of performance issues become visible only in Staging/QA system where models are tested against large data volumes.

Steps to follow Disaster Recovery with SAP HANA

Abstract
As devices, systems, and networks become more complex, there are simply more things that can go wrong due either to man-made or natural disasters. See the options available with SAP HANA for disaster recovery that help organizations keep business running smoothly in such circumstances.

Key Concept
SAP HANA provides a single platform to extract and analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in real time from multiple sources such as social media, blogs, online reviews, emails, and discussion forums. The analyzed information helps customer to answer specific questions, increase revenue, and make accurate and timely decisions. The analyzed information and the data that is accumulated over the years is the backbone for an organization. If something happens to the data due to natural or man-made disasters, business can come to a halt. Making use of the SAP HANA disaster recovery features can save companies from such an outcome.

Learning Objectives
By reading the article you will be able to:

• Understand the concept of disaster recovery
• Understand the disaster recovery options with SAP HANA

Nowadays most every company has its business continuity plan that helps during an unfortunate event such as flood or earthquake. A disaster recovery plan is part of business continuity plan focusing mainly on the restoration of IT infrastructure and operations after a crisis.

SAP HANA: What are packages in SAP HANA?

What is a Package?

This is a procedure for grouping together the related information objects in a structured way.

Types of Packages:

Use:

It groups all the information models and makes it easier to transport (import/export) the models which we have created in an efficient manner. Means we can "Package" our data models and easily import/export them to another HANA Studio instance.

How to Secure the Communication between SAP HANA Studio and SAP HANA Server through SSL

This blog shows you, how to secure the communication between HANA Server and HANA Studio through SSL. It is highly recommended when there are lot of sensitive data handled in the system, which you want to secure from the middle-man attacks. There could be multiple documents available in SCN on this topic, but here I wants to show my experience on setting this up, in short time.

Pre-requisites:

• HANA Server is installed and running
• HANA studio is installed in the local system
• Access to the HANA server
• Putty / WinSCP tools 

HANA Server and client without SSL configured:

Step by Step guide for creation of Structural Packages in SAP HANA Studio.

Different types of Packages in SAP HANA Modeler  :

Packages : Packages are the first logic storage component of an SAP HANA model. Within a package you define one or more attribute views, analytic views, calculation views,  analytic privileges, Decision Tables ,Procedures.

1. Structural - Package helps to organize the content in a logical  tree.

2. Non-Structural - Package contains information objects . Non-Structural are created by  Default.

Structural Package:

Lets Create a Parent Package  “ ZS_Australia “
                       Child Package (Sub Package )  “ ZS_Australia.NSW “
Step 1:
Right Click on Content < New< Package

The power of Smart Data Access (SDA) with SAP HANA SP08

Introduction

Smart Data Access (SDA) was first introduced with SAP HANA SP06 and it enables enterprise to dynamically access and report across heterogeneous sources like SAP HANA, Sybase IQ, Sybase ASE, Hadoop, SQL Server, Teradata, Oracle and SQL Server.

Please refer to the links below, for more details

SAP Unveils SAP HANA Service Pack 6 (SP6) for Big Data and Spatial Processing

Modelling capabilities on these remote virtual (SDA) tables were introduced with HANA SP07, however this was limited to SQL based calculation views. Graphical calculation views can also be created using the SDA tables, however in this scenario the Aggregation (read. GROUP BY) was not pushed down to the remote database.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2gB-XPbh9E7bk5va1JnVlNOdEE

SDA Features Enhancements with HANA SP08 (Rev 82)

Finally SAP HANA SP08 (rev 82) introduced the capability of Aggregation (GROUP BY) push down to the remote database in down in graphical calculations. That’s truly opens the possibility of building models on top of SDA virtual tables and hence building analytic solution.

Attribute View creation in SAP HANA(Using Single and Multiple Tables)

In this document, I am going to explain the steps involved in creating Attribute View in SAP HANA.
We can create Attributes Views....

1) Using single or Multiple Tables
2) Using existing attribute view to enhance your current one ( you want to show material description for each material number).

1) Using Single or Multiple Tables:
The below diagram shows the major steps involved in creating Attribute View.

The pre-requisites to create Attribute View are..

i) Tables should exist with data

ii) Package should exist.

In my earlier documents I have shown how to create tables and package.

• http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-25922
• http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-25996

Now we will discuss the steps involved in creating Attribute View.