Enabling on premise Fiori SSO with OpenSSL certificates – Part 1

I had described how to enable single-sign-on based on OpenSSL for Windows on a Web AS ABAP sandbox system and this information is still valid. However, both the NWAS ABAP as well as the OpenSSL tools have evolved considerably since 2012 so that I will describe an updated approach for Fiori single-sign-on in this blog series. I will start with explaining how to setup a sucure SSL connection to the Fiori Launchpad based on OpenSSL certificates.

Again, this blog is intended for you to learn and understand the concepts. Neither key lengths nor other security considerations except for making this example work have been considered.

Secure your HANA Cloud Connector with OpenSSL certificates – Part 1

Out of the box, the HANA Cloud Connector (SCC) is not secure, as clearly documented by the General Security Status:

As mentioned in the General Security Status, the out of the box SSL certificate does not use the host name as its common name (CN) and is therefore not trusted:

Enable TLS on HANA Web Dispatcher with OpenSSL certificates

Out of the box, my HANA Web Dispatcher comes with a self-signed SSL certificate, which makes its connections insecure:

Enable Smart Data Integration on your HANA, express edition

1. Increase the virtual machine memory to 12GB
2. Create a tenant database with the Data Provisioning Server enabled
3. Import the Smart Data Integration delivery unit
4. Configure the Smart Data Integration agent
5. Verify the Smart Data Integration agent connection

To make room for an additional HANA database container, I increase the memory of my HANA, express edition from its the 9GB after the upgrade to 12GB:

SAP HANA XS Classic, Develop your first SAP HANA XSC Application

Using HANA Cloud Platform

Each Trial HANA instance comes with the HANA Web-based Development Workbench. The workbench allows you to develop on HANA without the need to set up a local development environment.

Login to the HANA Cloud Cockpit with your free developer edition account.
Choose Databases & Schemas. You will need to create your new instance, to do this simple give it a name, enable web access and of course give a password. This password you will need to remember as it is the password for your SYSTEM user and how you will be able to access the server.

Deploy your mobile web app to SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Since any project that is created initially in the SAP Web IDE contains a neo-app.json file, it is ready to be deployed to HANA Cloud Platform. During the deployment process, Web IDE creates the HTML5 application in HANA Cloud Platform and also the related Git repository (which will track code changes) for your app automatically.

1. Open the SAP Web IDE.

2. In SAP Web IDE, select the northwind project folder and open the context menu by right-clicking on it. Choose Deploy > Deploy to SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

Upgrade your HANA, express edition

In my previous blog Secure your HANA, express edition I described how to register your HANA, express edition system with SUSE to receive critical security updates.

In this blog I will leverage this work to describe how to upgrade your HANA, express edition to the latest patch level. However, please be aware, that

1. This increases the memory required from 7 GB to 9 GB for the Server only option.
2. Also, temporarily, 24 GB of available RAM are needed for the upgrade.

To start with, I update the preinstalled VMware Tools to mount shared folders with the upgrade software packages.

Secure your HANA, express edition

As soon as I heard of the HANA, express edition I got it installed on my laptop. The Server only option requires 7 GB of available RAM, the Server + applications 12 GB.

Importing the images into VMware Player 7.1.4 went like a charm. However, the underlying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has received security updates since the HANA, express edition images had been build.

Therefore, the first step for me after logging into the hxehost system and changing the hxeadm password was to start the SLES setup tool YaST to add a SUSE subscription to the installation:

DIY: HANA express edition on Amazon Cloud

If you want to use HANA express edition on aws you probably want to install your own instance to get familiar with SAP HANA installation on the cloud and get more control over your configurations and application deployments.

Follow the below blog to install you free HANA expresses edition and make it accessible from the internet. Most of the steps are very straight forward and it will take you 3-4 hours to download and install.

1. Download the HANA express binary

Get yourself familiar with SAP HANA, express edition.

HANA SP12 Upgrade

Software/Patch required 

IMDB_SERVER100_122_1-10009569
IMDB_SERVER100_122_1-10009569.SAR
SAPCAR
hdblcm_prepare.sh

Prepare HANA Package for Upgrade

Download the following components in the directory of your choice (here I have taken ‘/media/hana_sp12’ as download directory) from service market place using Maintenance Optimizer:

SAP HANA Calculation View Columns Origin

After using so many Calc.Views that call another bunch of Calc.Views, etc. is really difficult to identify the correct origin (table.column/formula) of some field. This was causing some rework to understand all information needed and to correctly check and model the data

To solve that, I developed a really simple way to connect to HANA, get the dependency data and generates a JSON using Python and jQuery:

What is VORA and How it helps to Bridge the gap between Enterprise data and Big Data

Before getting into the Topic of VORA first we lets try to understand what is Enterprise data, Big Data, HADOOP, SPARK.

What is Enterprise Data – Data that comes from Day today business transactions eg. Sales order, Purchase Order, etc.

What is Big Data – Data that comes from information-sensing mobile devices, aerial (remote sensing), software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers and wireless sensor networks, Social Media and Archived Data.

Transferring Eclipse Project Artifacts between HANA systems using Web IDE w/b Editor

Introduction

In some environments, it is not always the case where control and security is necessary. Especially in home based developments such as HANA Express Edition, where you may wish to lift your efforts and take to another system.

If you are developing content in Eclipse, under a Project, and you have Functions amongst other Project artifacts. Using Eclipse File -> Export will not pick up certain objects, i.e. functions.

The various Functions exist in Project, along with Views. In the Export Dialog Window, the Functions are not visible, like the Views. More so, adding the Function Package, still does not find them.

Switching over to new HANA hardware

Basically the migration to the new HANA server is done via a backup/restore.
Difficult part was that this HANA server got its data from SAP ECC via a SAP SLT server.
So replication and database triggers should be taken into account when switching over.

The connections between the applications look like:

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.

Thoughts on SAP HANA Express

Upon my return from SAP TechEd Las Vegas last week I posted SAP TechEd & HANA Express Edition that covered the SAP HANA Express announcement.

Asked the question: 

"HANA Express appears to give individual developers the chance not just to learn but to actually build a HANA app … do you feel that ... HANA Express gives you the tools and licensing you need to take an app to market? … would this now make a viable launch point for entrepreneurial developers with fire in the belly?”

How to analyze and retain Unused Memory from the HANA/BODS/BW servers

This document is based on one of the major issue on memory bottleneck we are facing in our HANA landscape where we have BODS, BW and HANA DB all running on the same server. The Capacity of the server is quite high with memory of around 512GB and is distributed among different servers. To get the detail on which user is using how much RAM please run the following script:

#!/bin/sh
LDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'
tempsum=0
totalmem=0
for m in `ps -eo user,rss --sort user | sed -e 's/  */ /g' | awk -F'[ ]' {'print $0'}`; do