Persisting output from HANA View

Background is based on a problem we faced with a HANA calculation view that was not performing as we’d like to see it and there didn’t seem ways around performance issue. It was not volatile data in terms of changes so we decided best option would be to store the data on a load schedule in our HANA system. Question was then how to do that in HANA. As a background, I can say that we are on SPS09.
Process that we went with was to create a custom table that would be filled with stored procedure that would be scheduled to run a load frequency through xs admin. I’ll share the steps.
Creating the custom table would be based on the definitions that we had in HANA view. You can manually create the table in the schema that you’d like to store it, but alternative would be to run following script in SQL console:
create column table <schema>.<table name> as (select * from "_SYS_BIC".<package>/<HANA view>)

Developer's Journal: ABAP/HANA Connectivity via Secondary Database Connection

Introduction

In this first edition of this HANA Developer's Journey I barely scratched the surface on some of the ways which a developer might begin their transition into the HANA world. Today I want to describe a scenario I've been studying quite a lot in the past few days: accessing HANA from ABAP in the current state.  By this, I mean what can be built today.  We all know that SAP has some exciting plans for ABAP specific functionality on top of HANA, but what everyone might not know is how much can be done today when HANA runs as a secondary database for your current ABAP based systems.  This is exactly how SAP is building the current HANA Accelerators, so it’s worth taking a little time to study how these are built and what development options within the ABAP environment support this scenario.

Configuration and perfroming backups using netbackup for SAP HANA

The NetBackup for SAP HANA Agent integrates the backint interface for SAP HANA along with the backup and the recovery management capabilities of NetBackup. The software works in single as well as multi-node environments. Below are the list of activites that you need to perfrom in the HANA Studio for netbackup configuration.

1. Create hdbbackint soft link from /usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/global/hdb/opt/hdbbackint to /usr/openv/NetBackup/bin/hdbbackint_script for every database instance.

2. The parameter file (initSAP.utl) must be specified for data in the SAP HANA database instance configuration. To specify the parameter file, go to
Instance->Configuration-> global.ini > data_backup_parameter_file.

Tool for Quick Creation of Virtual Table in HANA

Introduction:

I have seen there is redundant work involved in creating Virtual table after setting up connection in HANA. So here is a tool which you can create in your schema to quickly create the tables.

My Scenario:

I have a scenario where I have to move an application from old SP09 landscape to SP11 landscape where most the Calculation views have virtual table.  In my scenario we have both the SCHEMA_NAME and the source is also HDB. So I have 2 scenario to cover to make it more generic.

Effective Query pruning using Constant Column in UNION node

So far we have known different modeling techniques for implementing business scenarios which include data from different sources, but need to be reported together in the output. The classic example for HANA modeling workshop is to display the “Actual” and “Planned” data, which can be combined together in a Calc view using UNION operator.

Fig 1. Actual vs Planned implementation using Projection nodes in UNION

SBEE Reporting from SAP HANA Live

With SAP HANA live views SAP seems to be taking a big leap into flexible reporting. HANA Live views provide a flexible and great way to run reporting directly out of HANA.  HANA studio offers great features and flexibility to create table joins, transformations/conversions and projections etc. to slice and dice the data within HANA studio.

SAP seems to be setting up a trend where reporting is going to get really agile and essentially there is no need to write ABAP code or transfer data to BW to draw reporting out of SAP. There are host of tools like BO, FIORI, LUMIRA, SBEE available to run the reporting directly out of HANA Views. I am going to talk little bit about SBEE.

SBEE (SAP Smart Business Enterprise Edition) is a dash boarding tool to run the reporting. SBEE is simple, intuitive tool which can be configured by end user/functional consultant. There is no need for developer to write any code. Primary purpose of SBEE is dashboard reporting for top leaders of organization/various groups. Dashboards like top 5 revenue generating products, top 5 customers, top 5 vendors etc.

SAP HANA Database as a Graph Store - Uncovering the network using Graph Algorithms

This Document is part of the series on HANA Database as a Graph Store in SAP HANA SPS 12 : SAP HANA Database as a Graph Store - Introduction

Let us figure out the other possibilities to uncover fraud rings in Insurance-Fraud scenario discussed in the previous documents using Graph Algorithms in SAP HANA.

Shortest Path Algorithm:

This action provides the information for the shortest path from the starting vertex to all reachable vertices.

SAP HANA Database as a Graph Store - Creating Graph Database Objects

This Document is part of the series on HANA Database as a Graph Store in SAP HANA SPS 12 : SAP HANA Database as a Graph Store - Introduction

After getting the brief understanding on Graph Database in the previous discussion, let us proceed ahead in creating the needed Graph Database objects for the discussed Insurance-Fraud scenario.

Let us create Graph Database tables for the edges and vertices  discussed in the previous Insurance-Fraud scenario using the below SQL's :

SAP HANA Database as a Graph Store - Introduction

SAP HANA database is continuously evolving with best fit functionalities to suffice varied needs of end user. HANA as a database supports more than primitive data types along with the defined set of operations on them. In the world of connected data, defining relationship among the available data set is one of the important aspects. RDBMSs are one such choice for storage of information's like financial records, manufacturing and logistical information, personnel data, and other applications.SAP HANA is at its core a columnar store optimized for relational records, which suffices the above mentioned needs and  it is not just that. Now it is also possible to identify relationships between the records in a deployment as a graph store without having to use an external store for same purpose.

From SPS12 version, HANA can be used as  a Graph Database. What do we mean by 'Graph Database' here? let us have a quick glimpse of what it is and proceed ahead with the computational capabilities in HANA to achieve the same.

ABAP CDS View with input parameters

ABAP CDS Views:

A CDS is defined for existing database tables and any other views or CDS Views in ABAP Dictionary using the statement DEFINE VIEW in the DDL in ABAP Core Data Services(CDS) . This is done in CDS Source code in the ABAP Development tools(ADT). Every CDS view has its own CDS Source code.

Two objects are created in ABAP Dictionary of Every CDS View:

• CDS Database View : It is read-only classical database view in ABAP Dictionary.
• CDS Entity: It is actual CDS view. It covers the CDS Database view and makes other attributes possible, such as authorization checks defined in CDS view

Introducing the new SAP HANA capture and replay tool, available with SAP HANA SPS12

Testing challenges

Testing application workload can be a huge effort for users, developers and consultants alike. Also, things do not get easier on a large scale, especially for moving from one revision or SPS of SAP HANA to another.

The common approach to this is using customized scripts for database access or executing test scenarios in client applications. Of course, developing such scenarios and test cases is a large and therefore very costly development effort – all of it just to ensure the solution still works correctly with the new SAP HANA software.

For regression testing a new SAP HANA SPS across a whole system landscape with multiple application stacks the complexity increases even more since now the interoperation between SAP HANA and the various client applications or reporting tools needs to be tested. The outcome of all this effort are hand-crafted tests that may only resemble the actual workload to a certain degree.

Fail-Safe Operation of SAP HANA®: SUSE Extends Its High-Availability Solution

“SAP customers invest in SAP HANA” is the conclusion reached by a recent market study carried out by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC). In Germany alone, half of companies expect SAP HANA to become the dominant database platform in the SAP environment. In many cases, the “SAP Business Suite® powered by SAP HANA” scenario is already being discussed in concrete terms.

Naturally, SUSE is also accommodating this development by providing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications – the recommended and supported operating system for SAP HANA. In close collaboration with SAP and hardware partners, therefore, SUSE will provide two resource agents for customers to ensure the high availability of SAP HANA system replications.

How to perform Currency Conversion in SAP HANA

In this document, I tried to explain "Currency Conversion" functionality. Through this, I am trying to provide the general functionality and idea about the Currency translation in SAP HANA.

Procedure:

1. Create an Analytical view

• Right Click on Analytical View > New

Executed TPC-H Benchmark queries on SAP HANA

I have used TPC-H benchmark(2.17.1) to run some tests on HANA database.Although all of the queries are written in the SQL-92 language, some queries still need to be rectified so that they can be executed on HANA.But the syntax differences don't necessary make SAP HANA SQL92 incompatible as the SQL standard leaves many aspects to the system implementation.

The fourth query ,for example, uses 'interval' to calculate a period of time.

SAP HANA XS Advanced Installation Guide through resident hdblcm (Command based)

SAP HANA XS Advanced Installation:

Prerequisites:
SAP HANA SPS11+, kindly upgrade your SAP HANA to SPS11 to use benefits of XSA

1. Download XS Advanced Run-time from SMP

How to Migrate Attribute, Analytical & SQL script based Calculation views

As mentioned in the document SAP HANA Features that are Deprecated the Attribute views, Analytical views and SQL Script based Calculation views are now deprecated. SAP discourages from using them in new projects and suggests that you migrate them into the appropriate recommended alternatives mentioned in this blog.

This document aims to provide you with the steps to Migrate the earlier created views.
1.1 To launch the Migration tool you need to go to the Console View by accessing Windows -> Show View -> Quick View

SAP HANA Smart Data Access: Modeling Recommendations

SAP HANA Smart Data Access: Modeling Recommendations

How to get abap date in HANA calculated column and calculate date difference

I had a requirement to find the date difference from the field LETZTZUG of table s032 and the current date.
Here the problem was getting the current date. I got the current date using now() function in calculated column functions.
The output of the now() was in yyyy-mm-dd hrs and second. I used date(now()) and got it as yyyy-mm-dd.
With this I was still not able to use daysbetween in order to find the duedate betwen LETZTZUG  and currentdate.
Then I used replace() function to eliminate '-' from the yyyy-mm-dd. So after that I could calculate the daysbetween().

SDI/SDQ OData Adapter in HANA SPS12 - GET, PUT operation and REPLICATION flowgraph

It is a really simple scenario we are dealing with: Accessing a public OData URL, read from and write to the tables exposed there. HANA is running on SPS12 on premise. The purpose of this blog entry is to better illustrate the different steps analogous as they are explained in the HANA EIM Administration Guide.

In this scenario we are accessing the following public OData Service URL (ODATA V4) which allows read and write operations.

http://services.odata.org/V4/OData/(S(1t3xkksfwh00yknrwftrjhm5))/OData.svc/

SAP Hana Dynamic Tiering setup on Multi-tenant database with DWF

 I’ll explain how install/ configure SAP Hana MDC with Dynamic Tiering and deploy SAP Hana Data Warehouse Foundation 1.0 in order to support data management and distribution within my landscape including Hadoop (spark) and Sybase IQ.

For my setup I’ll use my own lab on Vmware Vsphere 6.0, run SAP Hana revision 112.02 and use Sybase IQ and Hadoop HDFS stack 2.7.2.

I’ll will create a new environment by using vm template explain in my previous documentation.

Disclaimer: My deployment is only for test purpose, I make the security simple from a network perspective in order to realize this configuration and use open source software.

What’s new in SAP HANA SPS12 – Smart Data Access

Overview

The SPS12 release is upon us, and with it a few great new features for SDA: Kerberos constrained delegation, UPSERT support, ROW_NUMBER support, performance optimizations and more.

What is SAP HANA Smart Data Access?

For those of you not so familiar with SDA, it has been available as a part of SAP HANA since SPS6 and gives you the power to expose data from remote sources as virtual tables in SAP HANA. This is a huge advantage compared to traditional ETL processes in many situations as it is gives you a cost-efficient, easy-to-deploy option to get real-time data visibility across fragmented data sources. Not to mention the advantage it brings in terms of location agnostic development when building applications on HANA which need to leverage data from multiple sources.

SAP HANA Features that are Deprecated

From the latest series of HANA we will only use Calculation views for HANA Modeling. Except for specific cases as listed below, Analytical views and Attribute views are totally deprecated. Means, if you are working on HANA Modeling projects do not use these two types of views.

Within Calculation views - you can create Cube (aggregation node at the top Semantic layer) - equivalent for creating Analytical views, Dimension (projection node at the top Semantic layer) - equivalent to Attribute views. The third type is Cube Calculation view with SQL script. This is also deprecated. Only table functions will be used in future.

HANA Studio on High resolution displays

If you try to work with SAP HANA Studio on HiDPI (High resolution display), like Apple retina or Microsoft Surface, you will see that there is a problem with the size of the icons:

In Surface 4 at 2736x1824, icons are tiny, unusable, as you can see in the screenshot (compare it with the size of the fonts):