What is really changing with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01?

This new release includes enhancements for database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

This release also includes another important change which will have a greater influence on the landscape configuration and sizing of SAP HANA and will definitely encourage people to become more creative and flexible with the technical architecture.

Starting with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01, multitenant database containers (MDC) will be the only operational mode for SAP HANA systems. This means that if you upgrade to SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01, you will no longer be able to run a single-container HANA system.

It basically consists of a system database and one or more tenant databases. System database is used for overall system administration activities and tenant databases are self-contained and completely isolated in terms of persistence layer, database catalog, repository, backups and logs.

Figure 1: High Level SAP HANA MDC Architecture

With this release, SAP is positioning MDC as a standard architecture for new HANA systems and therefore each new SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01 installation will be in multi-container mode with one tenant database by default. If you upgrade from previous releases, the database of a single-container system will be converted into a system database and a tenant database and a new user (SYSTEM) will created in the system database (SYSTEMDB).The database superuser (SYSTEM) of the single-container system becomes the SYSTEM user of the tenant database. It is also possible to perform a near-zero downtime (NZD) update of a single-container system to SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01 in a system replication landscape. If your databases are already running in MDC, there will not be any changes in terms of architecture.

Your existing single-container system will be converted to a multi-system database provides centralized administration tasks including create, drop, start, stop tenant databases and perform backup/recovery, monitoring, system replication activities for all tenant databases; it needs to be backed up and integrated into your backup and monitoring schedule.

After the upgrade, you need to review below settings from technical point of view and reconfigure if necessary:

• Database configuration: After the upgrade, database parameters become database specific and stored with the tenant database.
• Users: All users of the single-container system are now present in the tenant database. It would be better to check and verify them before handing the system over to business.
• Ports: Tenant database will keep the existing port numbers of the original single-container system: 3NN03 for internal communication, 3NN15 for SQL access, and 3NN08 for HTTP. System database will have the following port numbers: 3NN01 for internal communication, 3NN13 for SQL access, and 3NN14 for HTTP (via XS).
• XS advanced runtime: If you have XS advanced runtime installed, a separate xsengine process is created and the internal Web Dispatcher of the SAP HANA system routes by default to the single tenant.