Automated SAP EDI testing for S/4HANA conversion projects

S/4HANA conversion projects are taking off with more and more companies moving to the latest version of the the famous SAP ERP system. On one hand this is a huge opportunity to start using the latest features but on the other hand it can be a challenge are the conversion process may require code or process changes. With S/4HANA Selective Data Transition projects companies are implementing more complex projects (new business functions, systems consolidations for merging many individual systems into a larger single instance or even doing carvouts where one system is split into a few simpler systems). The question is how can we make sure that the SAP EDI scenarios are working in the same way after the conversion as they did before the conversion?

HANA DB refresh/copy using Point in Time Recovery option

Background :- Basically, when we want to Copy a Production DB to QA DB, we are mostly left with the option to recover QA DB with a Complete Data Backup of the Prod DB which might be a few days older. But if we want to recover to recent point in time, we need to trigger a Complete Backup, copy the backup file to QA host and then Recover that, and this is more time consuming. Lets take an analogy of the same scenario with MS SQL Server, where we can restore the complete backup of the source DB in the target with No Recovery option a day prior to migration or refresh, and at the time of migration/refresh, we can take a diff backup and recover the target DB, which brings the data to most recent point in time without spending too much time. This option does not work in HANA as we need Backup Catalog to be available if we want to recover HANA DB with Complete Backup and Diff Backup. In this blog, I am suggesting a solution for this case.

HANA SQL Processing and Generating Optimum Plan

Need for Query optimization:

Globally lot of customers using SAP HANA for quite some time now. On one side they are enjoying benefits of in-memory capabilities but on other side there is exponential growth in data. Also, with more and more user adoption for self-service reporting, there is high chance that some of the best practices are not followed. This generates need for optimization of SQL queries getting triggered on HANA. If you do not have SQL query in proper manner it may not work in optimal way with this exponentially growing data. Sometimes some reporting tools generating SQL query in background which is not visible to business users and they will not have idea about the exact query.

Principal propagation setup with SAP S/4HANA on-premise system and SAP Cloud Platform

Principal propagation gives the ability to forward the user context of the message unchanged from the sender to the receiver.

In this blog post, lets discuss on how to implement SSO with principal propagation in a way that it trusts the requests coming via the cloud connector configured.

There are two levels of trust that needs to be configured. First, the Cloud Connector needs to identify itself with the system certificates for the HTTPS. Second, we need to allow this identity to propagate accordingly, so that a short lived X.509 certificate could be forwarded.

Finally, we map the user in the target system – the SAP S/4HANA on-premise system, in this case.

HCL Workload Automation and SAP best performance together

When we need operational efficiency and orchestration in an IT and Business workflows, Workload Automation is the best approach for Enterprise Resource Planning.

We see day by day our customers, especially those using SAP to run their critical jobs with specific time constraints and committed deadline.

Business jobs must run and must take less time as possible using at the best all available resources on the target server.

By leveraging the power of HCL Workload Automation and making the most out of its integration with SAP, we have seen our customers move their businesses to the next level of innovation and maturity.

Real-time reporting solution combining Geo-spatial and Financial data

In this blog post, I describe the steps I followed to create a real-time reporting solution combining Geo spatial and Financial data. The data is federated from SAP S/4HANA®  Flexible Real Estate Management (RE-FX), SAP Geographical Enablement Framework (SAP Geo Framework) and consumed using Esri ArcGIS (Pro or Insights).

This was an iterative process between the Data provisioning and Data consumption.

Components

◉ SAP S/4HANA Flexible Real Estate Management

◉ SAP Geographical Enablement Framework

◉ Esri ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Insights

SAP HANA Cloud modeling in Business Application Studio

SAP Business Application Studio is a new SAP Cloud Platform service available on CF environment, it has got a modern development environment to create business applications. It is available as a Cloud service and positioned as a successor to WebIDE fullstack. In the past, It has got features to support fiori and Cloud Application programming models but not the native HANA modeling models like Calculation views and HANA DB Explorer for runtime access. With that it used to be a combination of Web IDE full stack for Native HANA models(CVs) and BAS for other application developments. In the latest update to BAS, HANA modeling tools are made available to use.

SAP S/4HANA Data Management

This blog post targets SAP Solution Architects and Technical Architects who are planning or moved their SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA

Motivation

Data is the foundation for any business, well managed data is critical for any business process. Data Management Strategy is an essential activity to maintain a good system performance and to optimize the total cost of your system operations, data management is relevant for all SAP applications that generate large amounts of data.

How to load customers (business partners) with SAP S/4HANA data migration cockpit

Purpose

This blog explains the different approach for the load of customers, suppliers (vendors), contact persons in S/4HANA, that makes the use of business partners for these objects mandatory and old transactions like XD01, XK01, … have been deprecated and are no longer available. I will explain how the data migration cockpit can be used for customer load and what is the logic to fill the file template for customers with its different sheets (general data, sales view, finance view, contact persons,…).

How customers were loaded with ECC 6.0

With SAP ECC6.0 and previous versions it was common to create LSMW objects linked to different recordings created ad-hoc with transactions XD01 or VD01 or use program RFBIDEK0. File structure had to be defined within LSMW.

COPD study, explanation and interpretability with Python machine learning client for SAP HANA

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a type of obstructive lung disease. Globally, it is estimated that 3.17 million deaths were caused by this disease in 2015. Exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution, tabacco smoke (especially secondhand smoke), dusts and fumes is the key facts. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce two new features of Python machine learning client for SAP HANA: dataset report and model report to support me to study COPD cases. These two features provide great convenience to data scientists to analyze their data and the trained model. Let’s go through a use case to learn how it works.

S/4HANA – Extensibility Inventory fiori App

Overview of Extensibility Inventory

We can use this app to display an overview of your extensibility items and to view associations or dependencies between various extensibility items.

The Standard view in this app displays all existing extensibility items. To easily locate a given extensibility item, you can enter its name in the search box.

By clicking on an extensibility item, you can view information about it. The following information is provided:

SAP HANA Query Analysis and Optimization – using SQL Trace

I will discuss about the inbound SAP HANA Query Analysis and Optimization using SQL Trace.

There are three main analysis process by which we used to analysis HANA query and optimize it.

1. SQL Trace

2. Explain Plan

3. Visualized plan(PlanViz).

Today I will discuss about the analysis and Optimization of SAP HANA Query using SQL Trace. Before we use SQL trace the we need to use which scenario we will use SQL trace .For the below situation we will use SQL trace –

SAP HANA 2.0 High Availability Step By Step process

Introduction

This blog post walk’s you through the step by step process for SAP HANA 2.0 high availability setup.  How to add a stand by host.

A distributed HANA(scale out) setup need 2 servers (one worker, another  standby).

Note: Both Host1 and Host2  server’s date and time should be same.

Securing SAP HANA: 6 Best Practices

Protecting the sensitive information stored in your SAP HANA workloads is critical to maintain compliance and business continuity. However, as cyber security threats evolve in a rapid pace, keeping systems secure becomes increasingly challenging. 

Non Parameterized Query Processing in SAP HANA

In this blog I will discuss about the query processing steps inside SAP HANA  i.e. how the SAP HANA  process a query in a optimize way and what are SAP HANA component associate with the processing.

The main objective is to discuss about the techniques we will use to optimize query performance in a better way when business critical HANA query or HANA information view got stuck or taking to much time to execute. But that I will discuss one by one on the next blogs… to do that we need to know basic query processing architecture of HANA and steps in details which I will discuss in this blog.

Track ISS with SAP Data Intelligence and SAP HANA: Ingest and transform data

The purpose of this post is purely educational. Using SAP Data Intelligence and SAP HANA for what we will achieve is the overkill. But learning how to build data pipelines while having fun and learning something about space (what we geeks all love) should be reasonable.

Introducing the SAP HANA Cloud Management Tool

Overview

The SAP HANA Cloud management tool (HCMT) is a new addition to the database administration (DBA) tooling in SAP HANA Cloud services. Users already using the SAP HANA cockpit DBA tool will find the HCMT to be similar to the Database Directory application. The HCMT is invoked via a new option along with the SAP HANA cockpit and the SAP HANA Database Explorer (DBX) on the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit instances page for SAP HANA Cloud.

The aim of the SAP HANA Cloud management tool is to provide DBAs with a simple and centralized overview of their SAP HANA Cloud database and data lake instances. You can also perform management tasks such as creating new instances, checking their status, reviewing any notifications and alerts that might have been raised, examining memory and storage consumption, and start//stop/edit/delete your instances.

External HANA view configuration in BW on HANA

1. Overview

SAP Introduced new functionality after BW 7.4 on HANA where we can generate HANA view directly from BW application during BW object activation, The external HANA view enables to create scenarios where data, which is modeled in the BW system, are merged with data modeled in SAP HANA with SAP HANA tools.

This document will provide you an overview of external HANA view configuration from the SAP BASIS point of view.

How to Generate a Email Notification when PM Order/Workorder is Technical completed?

Introduction

This blog will cover the condition where you can generate a Notification to Appropriate Authority which can be a Buyer/Procurement Department , Accounts Payable Department/ Finance Department etc, that a Plant Maintenance Order/Workorder has been Technically Completed(TECO).

Agile Data Modeling with SAP BW/4 HANA

Intro

SAP BW means inflexible and expensive monolith? That doesn’t have to be! With SAP BW/4 HANA, the development can be much more iterative than before.

So the following applies(?): SAP BW/4 HANA = leaner, faster … cheaper? It depends on your architecture!

With this post I would like to give you an impression of why SAP BW/4 HANA (finally) enables data models that react flexibly to changes!

Tuning SAP IQ NLS in SAP BW on HANA and BW/4HANA

Introduction

In any SAP BW on HANA and BW/4HANA implementations, customers use an NLS (Near Line Store) solution to offload and archive data from the main system.  The offering from SAP as well as a few partners uses SAP IQ as the database for the NLS solution.  Invariably, situations arise when performance against data in the NLS system just seems slower than it should be.

The focus of this blog is to point you in the different directions that can be at the root cause of any performance issues.  As always, we must be prepared to change our expectations.  On countless occasions, I have had customers demand that the NLS system perform at the same level as the HANA system.  That is just not realistic and should never be expected.  SAP HANA operates on data that is in-memory and was designed to be an in-memory platform.  SAP IQ is a general purpose database that was designed for disk based storage, albeit highly optimized.

Set up real-time replication tasks with the SAP Web IDE and SAP Smart Data Integration

The SAP Web IDE provides so-called replication tasks to set up real-time replication. It provides a graphical UI to browse tables in your connected source systems, create virtual tables, create subscriptions for real-time replication, create data load partitioning strategies, and more. The replication tasks in Web IDE are part of the SAP Smart Data Integration (SDI) toolset, which comes integrated with the SAP HANA platform, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Understanding the development process of calculation view in HANA 2.0 XSA environment using Web IDE

In this blog I will discuss about the development lifecycle process and steps of develop an calculation view in HANA 2.0 XSA environment using Web IDE.

In HANA 1.0 till SPS12 we have developed Calculation view with the catalog object tables from a schema also the operation available for development like Join, Union is very less.

In HANA 2.0 XSA environment using web IDE we will get more operation option like NonEqui Join, Graph, Rank, Rank, Hierarchy Function, Anonymization etc. which are not  available in HANA studio. Those option any body can easily adopt and use in their view development. I will not discuss this in my blog.

Compliant Data Access – A key Self-Service Requirement in 2020

Sensitive & Compliant Data Access – A key Self-Service Requirement in 2020

Enabled in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud through SAP HANA data anonymization

A growing number of people is making use of the latest technologies. Its power and increasing accessibility are shown in personal apps that ultimately generate data. For companies that build solutions on new technologies and retrieve information about their users, it is key to use methodologies that allow handling sensitive data with care. In order to derive insights from data, adherence to data privacy laws and regulations needs to be ensured. These considerations are necessary not only with regards to external customer or supplier data but also when working with internal data as we did in the case outlined in this blog article.

Create custom filters using SAP Analytics Cloud Analytics Designer and SAP HANA

Introduction

SAP Analytics Cloud’s story mode supports various filter concepts such as story filters, page filters, widget filters, input controls and linked analysis. SAC’s Analytic Application uses a different approach to implement filter capabilities in dashboards. In fact, the Analytics Designer (where Analytic Applications are created) is all about customization and flexibility.

SAC’s Analytics Designer provides filtering capabilities through programming APIs. A full documentation of SAC Analytics Designer APIs can be found here. This enables developers to create the desired filtering logic within a dashboard. Furthermore, with Analytics Designer APIs you can create your own filtering concepts! This blog post will guide you along one specific scenario to create such a custom filter.

Migrating SAP HANA to the Cloud: AWS, Azure, and GCP

What Is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is an in-memory system for managing relational databases. Because HANA is based on a columnar structure, and stores all data in memory, data can be retrieved with very high performance compared to traditional RDBMS systems. SAP HANA is commonly used for next generation applications, business intelligence, and analytics.

Create your trial SAP HANA cloud instance in sap cloud foundry

SAP HANA Cloud Instance setup

To get started with SAP HANA Cloud, you need to create your trial instance. Because you are using a trial account, you will only be able to create one instance with a predefined size, which you see now on the screen. However, the process to create the instance is very similar to what you will see later if you choose to have a production instance of SAP HANA Cloud.

Flexible Master Data Associations with SAP BW / 4HANA: Opportunities and Limits

Intro

Changed Requirements for modern Data Warehouse Systems mean that aspects such as Simplicity, Flexibility and Agility are becomming more important and therefore should be considered in the architecture and modeling of such systems.

With its data warehouse product, SAP BW4 / HANA, SAP offers the possibility of implementing such modern architectures beyond a rigid and outdated Layered Scalable Architecture (LSA). SAP recommends an architecture that is based on the LSA ++. This new layer approach is particularly characterized by the focus on virtual objects. Virtualization means that fewer copies of data are required between layers of architecture, making their design simpler, smaller and faster. The data warehouse architecture should be designed as lean and simple as possible.

Set up real-time trigger-based replication from MSSQL to SAP HANA Cloud (or on-prem) using SAP Smart Data Integration (SDI)

In this blog I describe how to set up real-time replication, and in this case for a Microsoft SQL, or MSSQL, database. The tool of choice is SAP Smart Data Integration (SDI), which comes with SAP HANA Cloud or the on-prem version.

The whole process is also documented in the readme file of this Github repo. That repo also contains the Web IDE project to built on top of the replication setup. How you can use the Web IDE to create real-time replication tasks, I’ll describe as a follow-up blog.

SAP S/4HANA Authorizations

SAP S/4 HANA implementation involve massive business process reengineering and introduces a new user interfaces (SAP Fiori) with a shift from monolithic solutions to activity-based apps which means many changes to the Technical and Business users. This raises a question whether the previous authorization concept still support the security requirements of SAP S/4HANA?

Use SLES 15.2 To Automate SAP HANA HA Maintenance

I have talked about how SLES HA Automation process can really help to build and deploy an SAP HANA environment highly available. Let’s continue to explore SLES 15.2 capabilities for SAP HANA platform and more.

For this second article, I will talk to you about how SLES HA Cluster Update for SAP HANA can be leverage for nZDU (upgrade/update). By using this process, SLES gives the ability to orchestrate your SAP HANA maintenance in an HA environment, fully guided and in the right sequence from a cluster point of view.

Anatomy of the Operational Delta Queues in SAP ODP Extractors

Introduction

Recently, while working on a Greenfield BW/4HANA project, I found myself asking a lot of questions about the inner workings of the SAP Operational Delta Queue (ODQ) which replaced the traditional BW delta queue (RSA7) in SAP ECC system. What is ODP framework? What is the location of ODQ? How ODQ behaves for different delta types? What are important ODQ tables? How ODQ retention period is maintained? Having done some digging into the ODQ itself, I discovered more detail than I’d seen online, so thought it would be worth sharing my findings in this blog.

Why are scalar UDFs so slow?

When loading data from source systems, there are requirements in SAP BW that are often repeated at the field level. This includes, above all, logic for cleaning up and processing the data, such as:

◉ Add and remove leading zeros

◉ Case distinctions

◉ Remove spaces at the beginning or end

◉ Conversion to capital letters

◉ Derive one field from another with fixed pattern sub-strings, e.g. COAREA ==> COUNTRY

◉ Derivation of time characteristics

Making backups in HANA (old fashion style) for SAP Business One 10

Brief

When we starting with the operation of a SAP Business One on HANA 10 environment, sometimes you may find that there are no possibilities to install a SAP HANA Cockpit for the administration of the database HANA 2.0 or simply “it is not budgeted” in the scope of the project .

Due to the characteristics of this type of project and the target of some the clients, many times these don’t have the necessary infrastructure and the technical personnel qualified for the administration of HANA as it “should be”.

This happens mainly in On-Premise environments where the customer has to ensure the security and integrity of their data, regardless of whether the solution is installed under a hyperscaler or not.

Use SLES 15.2 To Automate SAP HANA High Availability

I will talk to you about how SLES HA Automation process and integration work with SAP HANA to facilitate the management of these systems, but also how to get the best of this marriage by leveraging enhanced native SLES tools specifically for SAP platform.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud – Connecting local systems like SAP BW/4HANA

Intro

The Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) comes out-of-the-box with the option of uploading your own data in the form of flat files. This is sufficient for smaller demo scenarios, but for serious use the requirement to connect data from existing systems arises very quickly.

The connection of own systems takes place via Smart Data Integration (SDI), which is an integral part of the Data Warehouse Cloud. A data provisioning agent then creates the bridge to the SDI of DWC on premise.

Since the DWC is tenant-based software-as-a-service solution, the SDI component cannot simply be installed on the DWC side or configured using the usual means. Instead, DWC also offers the option of connecting local systems “as-a-service”, which only needs to be connected to the local components accordingly.

Private Connectivity to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud via AWS Direct Connect

In this blog, we explore how dedicated private connectivity between SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud running on AWS and on-premise data center can be achieved. Presently, there are two options for customers to connect from their on-premise data center to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

● Site-to-Site VPN Tunnel

● AWS Direct Connect

Challenges with Site-to-Site VPN are as follows:

From a security and compliance perspective, many government and public sector organization do not allow public internet to access critical business application over the internet. This is one of the biggest limitations and impediments to meeting regulatory compliance requirements. Besides, typically site-to-site VPN offers very limited non-guaranteed bandwidth, typically 1Gbps per tunnel. As the traffic via Internet traverse via multiple internet router hops, it is expected that there would be higher latency traversing over public network.

HANA Data Privacy & Anonymization Visualized

I wanted to share a visual example that describes some of the HANA data privacy capabilities and anonymization features. There’s a YouTube video below that shows these exposed through SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).

HANA anonymisation covers multiple features

1. Data Masking

2. Differential Privacy

3. k-Anonymity

4. i-Diversity

Decision Table in HANA! Why, When we need and How to Create.

Decision tables are very important concepts in SAP HANA native modelling. Ideally when we are working with IBP and APO even ECC or S/4 HANA source systems in SAP HANA Native modelling then definitely one might had created and used decision tables.

Decision tables are kind of ETL rules applied on a Column. So it a table with ETL rules wrapped in ti with Conditions and Actions.

There are few information about Decision Table but we must know when we need it and if at all we need How to do it. Below blog post Cleary illustrates the creation and usage of DT in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

Native HANA project approach to migrate HANA 1.0 to HANA 2.0

In this blog, I am going to highlight on the approaches which will give a detail view of which option we will implement for migration of HANA DB 1.0 SPS12 version to HANA 2.0 SPS 04 or 05 in a ongoing Native HANA Project.

In one approach only DB upgrade is required and no application server upgrade is required and only limited to the basis team activity. In the other approaches along with HANA DB upgrade Application Server(XS server) need to the upgraded and developer involved in lots of activities.

Data Provisioning using OracleLogreaderAdapter and CamelJDBCAdapter

What is DATA Provisioning?

DATA Provisioning is a process of creating, preparing, and enabling a network to provide data to its user. Data needs to be loaded to SAP HANA before data reaches to the user via a front-end tool.

SAP HANA Smart Data Integration

SAP HANA smart data integration loads data, in batch or real-time, into SAP HANA (on premise or in the cloud) from a variety of sources using pre-built and custom adapters.

Agile Data Warehousing with SAP BW/4 HANA

Intro

Agile Approaches and organisations have been very present in the media for a long time and have been used in Software-Development for a long time.

We encounter the result of agile software development every day when using Amazon, Spotify, but also SAP cloud solutions such as the SAP Analytics Cloud. The short time until new features are available shape the expectations of users of other software solutions. Agile methods of software development are less widespread in the development of SAP data warehouse solutions. It is argued that in the data management area it is not possible to develop small usable product increments, and that agile development methods are therefore fundamentally out of the question. In this article I would like to explain why methods of agile software development are also useful and possible in the data warehouse. Here I concentrate on SAP BW / 4HANA and highlight which properties are important for an agile design of the data warehouse.

Pitfalls at S/4HANA db tables with replacement object

1. Introduction

Due to the change of some data models, SAP uses so-called replacement objects for some db tables in S/4HANA. There are some oddities to consider, which I would like to discuss in this blog post.

Since the basis for the replacement object is a CDS-View, it seems mysteriously that a db table can also exist on the HANA database at the same time, where individual data records can be stored.

HANA Fast Restart – Customer Experience

SAP HANA Fast Restart (TMPFS) is available from HANA 2.0 SPS 04. There few nice blogs which already addressing  the  Technical setup and theoretical information of this feature . This year we had implemented this feature in few customer HANA production systems who has very high restart times.

SAP HANA Fast Restart – TMPFS

◉ SAP HANA uses TMPFS Linux Concept to store column store in memory and this concept is know as SAP Fast Restart Option. So, when ever the HANA database is restarted column store tables are never unloaded and there in memory all the time until OS is restarted or any of the maintenance activity is performed on OS

Conceptualizing Two-Tier SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management

Business Background and Introduction of the Concept

Our On-premise customers today face an uphill task of mapping requirements with processes across several solution offerings. Even in a specific area like project management, we see a lot of different capabilities provided in different project management solutions. Some solutions offer a great risk management framework; some offer a wonderful scheduling experience while some others offer seamless integration to downstream and third-party applications. But all these solutions try to address the same base purpose, “The need to have an integrated end-to-end business process setup for project ”, starting from ideation to project closure.

Eclipse Dirigible – connect to HANA Schema on the SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment

Overview

Eclipse Dirigible is an open-source cloud development platform that provides capabilities for end-to-end development processes from database modeling and management, through RESTful services using server-side JavaScript, to pattern-based user interface generation, role-based security, external services integration, testing, debugging, operations and monitoring.

Installing SAP HANA, express edition into WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Introduction

In this blog post I will describe the steps I went through to experimentally install SAP HANA, express edition into WSL2 – Windows Subsystem for Linux Version 2. Before I jump into any content, though, I want to start with a disclaimer.

Although I work for SAP, what I’m describing here is not an official SAP supported approach to install or run our software.  This is the result of my personal experimentation and exploration. Use at your own risk.

Reduction of Disk Size by Packed LOB Container

Summary

On the purpose of prevent further increasing of LOB entries on table /AIF/PERS_XML, the deletion strategy was carried out on the production system. After the records, which is out of data retention, had been deleted, the number of LOBs on table /AIF/PERS_XML had reduced accordingly; However, the disk size of packed LOB container had never been reduced. This issue had brought the following concerns:

Driving Adoption of New Innovation SAP MaxAttention Services

In this blog, you will learn about some great innovation ideas and insights that you can leverage to address your business needs and requirements and achieve valuable business outcomes and experiences in a number of different solution areas.

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud Vs SAP Cloud Platform Vs SAP HANA Cloud

In this blog post, I am trying to bring 3 different concepts with SAP cloud offering and demonstrate how these are different from other. First, we will discuss about SAP HANA Enterprise cloud and then narrow down to discuss about SAP HANA Cloud platform to understand about cloud foundry environment and then we will further narrow down to understand SAP HANA Cloud database features and new innovations.

Single Sign-On with SAP HANA Scale-out System using Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directory

Preamble: Being an SAP technology consultant, throughout my career I have been getting so many helps from the contents written by the experts of SAP Community , hence I thought this is the pay-back time.

If you are well aware of the architecture of SAP HANA Platform and Kerberos , then needless to say this SSO works for a SAP HANA Scale-out system as well. But when I had implemented it for a customer , I found it hard to find any relevant documentation that could’ve supported my understanding and made my life bit easy. So, as I dealt with it already ,here I am with this blog , that will depict the exact configuration steps for the aforesaid to move forward.

Proximity Placement Groups in Azure : Testing the Impact on Query Performance in HANA

Network Latency in SAP Environments:

Network latency is a very important metric to be measured, which has a direct impact on runtime of jobs or transactions run by users. Many SAP applications ( custom and standard ) run queries as part of application logic which requires multiple round-trips to database sometimes based on the program design. Examples could be a SELECT … UPTO 1 ROWS in a loop etc.

A slight increase in latency can multiply as the number of times the loop is run and fetching records from database. During a migration of SAP to a IaaS or on-premise provider,  it is difficult to identify these changes from an application level if the change is very insignificant per record, however it can multiply many fold if the logic is run in a loop.

How to find HANA disk size,memory size,record count,memory usage of COLUMN TABLES in HANA

Simple but Important commands in HANA DB on M_TABLE_PERSISTENCE_STATISTICS Vs M_TABLES Vs M_CS_TABLES

A. Different use cases of using M_TABLE_PERSISTENCE_STATISTICS

1. Wanted to find the disk size of your HANA DB

select sum((disk_size)/1024/1024/1024) from m_table_persistence_statistics;

Establish a live connection with SAP Analytics Cloud from SAP Cloud Platform- Cloud Foundry

I have described the end-to-end steps it takes to establish a live data connectivity between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform HANA database which runs on Neo Platform.

But now that the SAP Cloud Platform runs on Cloud Foundry – a few steps in the process would change as well as some new steps needs to performed.

Office Check-In App using Cloud Apllication Programming Model and React.js

 SAP has always helped its customer to run their best. And in this pandemic situation it is no different.

Bearing that in mind, we, from the Brazilian Presales Platform & Technology team, proudly developed an application that controls office access as an effort for a safe return to normality. It is a very simple application, which its source code will be distributed freely to customers. The goal of this app is to ensure that the office always respects its available capacity and employees are able to perform social distancing, in a very simplified manner and at an extremely low cost of implementation. The application flow is demonstrated on the picture below:

Altering HANA behavior during peak load via ADMISSION CONTROL

Altering HANA behavior at peak load using Admission Control in HANA 2.0

Below are the details which helps us understand how HANA 2.0 uses admission control to handle higher system load in a simple question and answer format. Hope it helps!

NOTE:You might not be able to find some of system views (M_ADMISSION_CONTROL_*) specified here if you are not in HANA 2.0 SP05 , though HANA 2.0 has a default admission control enabled.

S/4HANA in 5 minutes or less – Interaction between CO and FI

During the last S/4HANA conversions, which I was fortunate enough to accompany, it became particularly apparent that, in addition to the technological challenges and the adaptation of new functions, the cooperation between departments had to be adapted, sometimes drastically.

One of the most popular challenges was the need to bring internal accounting (CO) and financial accounting (FI) closer together. Here, the responsibilities were reassigned with every S/4HANA transformation I know of.

Connect MS-Excel to SAP HANA Database/Analysis in excel with HANA data

SAP HANA is a high-performance in-memory database that accelerates data-driven, real-time decision-making and actions and supports all workloads with the broadest advanced analytics on multi-model data, on premise and in the cloud. We all know that the HANA is a database technology which provides data to the users very fast.

On the other hand, MS Excel is one of the most widely used data representation, analysis and reporting software of all time and still it is one of the most important software used throughout the world.

SAP HANA Sizing Essentials – A quick guide to HANA Sizing for license calculation

1. Overview and conciderations

A proper HANA Sizing is important for any customer who wants to switch to SAP HANA as platform to run the SAP Business Suite or SAP Business Warehouse. It is mandatory for calculating the SAP license for Enterprise Edition (in-memory metric based) and it is as well important to assure the optimal performance of SAP HANA.

Whereas the SAP HANA memory requirement is most important for the license calculation there is also a sizing for CPU cores, disk space and network load which are important for the expected performance of the HANA-System. In this article we concentrate on the HANA-in-momory sizing.

How-to Master Data Planning in SAP BW/4HANA

Introduction

In a BW project a typical requirement is that business wants to change or enrich Master Data. Until now this was mostly done with customized solutions like having a special aDSO working as control table with a class for master data update or doing it in the BPC Master Data Administration. Since BW/4HANA 1.0 SP 08 there is a simple solution available, which I will show in a short use case.

How to analyze S/4HANA tables with proxy objects

Since we, the BI folks need to deal with ERP quite a bit, it is also sometimes handy to understand how things are structured “out there”. So, this writing is about proxy-objects / replacement views and associated topics. I will do it based on two examples that came from real-life questions so we can generalize afterwards.

First and foremost, we are dealing with a “new” ERP now, which is called S/4HANA. You may ask me now why is this important? Well, because that has changed things for us (BW folks) under the hood. To illustrate it I have made a GIF out of a slide that has been ever presented on a TechEd, wherein it is visible per area which of the tables lost their original importance and have been at least partially replaced by something.

Import large flat files into SAP HANA using Python and SQLAlchemy

Introduction

SAP HANA provides and supports various capabilities for data integration and data provisioning to realize lots of different integration scenarios. However, there are also certain scenarios in which you just want to load data from local flat files once, without putting effort in setting up a proper data integration landscape.

As part of my daily work with SAP HANA, this requirement usually pops up when working on demos, proof of concepts or performance/load tests. In such cases, I sometimes receive large flat files with the data I need to load into SAP HANA.

SAPS/4 HANA 1809: End to End Implementation of customized workflow for Bank Account Management

Introduction:

During recent changes (SAP S/4 HANA 1709 onward) SAP has moved the Bank Account Management (BAM) to Fiori Application known as ‘Manage Bank Accounts’. SAP has provided step by step configuration guide for Cash Management which covers the basic configurations and to trigger the standard WF associated with it.

SAP Analytics Cloud Custom Widget REST API with OAuth 2.0 and SAP HANA XSA

We’ll learn how to create a SAP Analytics Cloud custom widget REST API with OAuth 2.0 and SAP HANA XSA.

SAP S/4HANA Reconciliation with SAP Data Services (E2E)

In this blog post I’d like to share the insights of a customer project where we added data reconciliation after the SAP S/4HANA Migration activities.

The blog post explains the following:

◉ SAP S/4HANA Migration related data objects and how to do manual recon
◉ Architecture for End-2-End (E2E) automated reconciliation using
    ◉ SAP Data Services
    ◉ SAP ECC 6.0 Source system
    ◉ SAP S/4HANA Target system
    ◉ ABAP Web Dynpro screens
◉ SAP Data Services processes required for automatic reconcilation
◉ ABAP Web Dynpro screens for results display

S/4 HANA On-Premise In-App Key User Extensibility – Custom Business Objects

As there are many S/4 HANA implementations are now coming into picture the usage of the Custom Business objects CBO’s is suggested by SAP to replace standard custom SE11 tables.

The below blog will focus on the S/4 HANA On-Premise system

Advantages:

◉ As the name suggests Key User Extensions it is designed by SAP so that end users can create the CBO’s with out help of the developers and with a checkbox generate also the UI for the maintainance of the Fiori application

Implementing View-based SSCUI in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

In this blog post, I will share my understanding and knowledge about SSCUI development steps.

What is SSCUI?

SSCUI stands for Self-Service Configuration User Interface.

SAP HANA SPS upgrade step-by-step guide

Introduction

Basis Administration in the Age of SAP HANA requires new skills from SAP Basis Administrators. One of them HANA DB Maintenance & Upgrade. For example, SPS updates should be installed at regular intervals to avoid errors and to keep your Database up to date

SAP’s Data Tiering Options and Detailed Planning

Executive Summary:

Every Organization has the biggest challenge to reduce the TCO (Total cost of ownership). One of the major contributor in that is the cost of Hardware on which ERP applications are running.

With evolution of new technology and presence of Cloud services, the availability of these Hardware has been made very easy, but still when we talk about the compute capability then each organization has to plan for the quantum of data it needs to store which will be inline with there Business needs and comes handy for future planning during data analysis.

Custom Flexible Workflow steps

Introduction

In this blog post, you will see how to create and configure a complex Custom Flexible Workflow for Purchase Order approval.

Below is the example scenario:

Introducing the Automated Predictive Library (APL) for SAC AND HANA

Where does APL come from?

When SAP acquired KXEN in 2013, the company offered a software solution to help companies to create and manage predictive models in a semi-automated mode. This engine has evolved to meet SAP’s quality criteria and has been adapted to run in HANA. It then took the name Automated Predictive Library (APL). It is constantly evolving and improving, for example by integrating new Machine Learning algorithms, while respecting what makes it unique, i.e. being an automated Machine Learning engine.

Access SAP HANA records from VS (Visual Studio) Code

So let us begin……

Step 1: Install VS Code extension SAP HANA Driver for SQLTools by navigating to the extensions window and search for publisher:”SAP”. We can see our required extension. Click on the install. Internally it has a dependency extension (SQLTools) which will be installed automatically.

A new approach for replicating tables across different SAP HANA systems

Starting with SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA supports a new remote table replication feature for replicating tables across different SAP HANA systems natively. With this new feature, users can handily replicate remote tables as it directly sends DDL and DML logs from a source system to a target system through SAP HANA smart data access (SDA) ODBC connection.

HANA – Most Common SQL Statements

Install Hana Express Edition on MS Azure

Purpose

This blog post is created to use SAP HANA express edition using Azure. Primary purpose of this blog post is to get familiarized with SAP HANA. This post is targeted for system administrators.

Credit – Images/URLs used in this document are from Microsoft Azure portal available in public domain.

HANA Machine Learning (ML) -Analysis Association Frequent Pattern(FP) Growth Algorithm using Python

Association analysis is process of finding interested relationship in large datasets. This is  been used in grocery stores like coupons we found , packaged deals, the way items are displayed on shelfs or together. Some common examples of Data Associations are:-

“People who buy bread tend to buy butter or jam as well. Because normally breakfast goes with bread and butter.”

“People who buys diapers tends to buy beer as well. Because raising kids is a stressful job”

Live Data Connection to SAP HANA Using a Tunnel Connection with SAP Analytics Cloud

Abstract.

The requirement is to be able to combine the direct and live user access to internal SAP HANA systems [within corporate firewalls] and when users are not connected to the corporate network [from outside of corporate firewalls].

◉ SAP Analytics Cloud [SAC] is a SaaS tenant running on public internet.
◉ Live connectivity is required as data must not be duplicated or moved.
◉ Direct access. The internal [on premise] SAP HANA [HANA] backend systems InA endpoints cannot be accessed outside of the corporate firewall.

SAP HANA Data Anonymization: Machine Learning on privacy preserving data

Introduction

For a Data Scientist in the corporate area like me, data privacy is a tremendous challenge: Data is the source of all the powerful things we can do with Analytics or Machine Learning, but since it is often personal and sensitive we cannot simply use it as of course our responsibility is to preserve the privacy of individuals. This is covered by legislation, such as GDPR in Europe, which also requires us to get a proper consent from the customer to use his/her data in these kinds of applications. In many cases, we do have some consent documented, but it doesn’t cover our specific use case as it wasn’t know at the time the consent was requested.

Understanding SAP Versions

SAP continues to update their offerings to further improve the user experience. While this is great to ensure our ERP systems have the greatest capabilities possible, it can be hard to keep track that our own systems are up to date. That’s why we put together a list of the SAP versions and how your business can learn more about which version you are operating.

Other DB to HANA Migration cycle, roles/responsibilities of basis,functional & technical resources

New thing? No! This(migration) is the ongoing journey to be embark upon, which all businesses today or tomorrow have to ride on.

As usual, whenever I complete any assignment/project, I blog it and share the insights, in and out of that on this platform in easiest way possible.

How to find-out an IDOC number when we know a specific value(Purchase order) to search.

Issue statement: When we have a very high volume of IDOCs in the system, it is difficult to find a specific IDOC number for the key value. i.e purchase order, clearing document, sales order, or any key data for which IDOC is created. This can be an inbound or outbound IDOC number.

Please follow the below steps to identify an IDOC number without spending a lot of time in analysis. I am taking an example of IDOC for the purchase order creation scenario and in the SAP S4 HANA system.

Step 1: Find a key value for which you want to find an IDOC number. In my example, I am searching for an IDOC number for the purchase order created as I know my specific purchase order number, which means when a purchase order is created an IDOC will be generated. DOC requirement depends on the business case and I am not going into the business case for this POC.

SAP S/4HANA Model Company SAP BW client switch

As we are aware that SAP S/4HANA comes with an embedded BW  (SAP Business Warehouse) functionality.

The embedded BW client can be an integrated client along with your main ERP productive client or it can be a separate client depending on the use case.

Many customers are reaping the benefits of embedded  BW in SAP S/4HANA for embedded analytics,for reporting and planning.

Handling Null and Empty Values in Join Function using Auto filling Option

SAP Profitability and Performance Management (PaPM) Join Function is referred to as a processing function that is used to combine two or more inputs, either data source function such as model table or other processing functions such as allocation and calculation, to form an enriched result based on the settings configured on the function.

During data preparation or checking of results, there are two common data values which I encounter namely, Null and Initial. In SAP PaPM, both Null and Initial are represented by an empty cell for characteristic and “0” for the key figure, respectively.

Creating an SAC Geo Map from WebIDE (HDI) based Calculation Views

In this blog post I will share how to create an SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), Geo Map based on Calculation Views created within the WebIDE. These are Calc Views that reside within an HDI Container as Column Views.

Pre-requisites

1. HANA Cloud / HANA On-Prem with XSA

2. Live Connection from SAC to HANA

3. Dataset with Latitude and Longitude

4. WebIDE Calculation Views

Get On-boarded with HANA XSA and Python Application using hdbcli

In this post, I will be discussing on how to connect Python application to HANA XSA using hdbcli. I will also include what are the prerequisites to get the environment set up and will demo the end to end execution steps using the screen shots.

Some previous knowledge on Python will be great but not required as I will explain everything in detail as we move further.

CAP: Demystify User Authentication

Before the release of the CAP Model, I have been working on the XSJS framework both in XSA and Cloud Foundry environments. And because of that, I’ve gotten familiar with how the framework handles user authentication. Now, with the CAP Model taking over, I have to start over again and figure out how does the CDS framework handles the user authentication.

In this blog post, I will share my journey in understanding how CAP handles user authentication and what it does behind the scenes. I will show how to set up user authentication for a CAP-based service. Subsequently, I will deep dive into the inner workings of the CDS framework and unearth how user information is handled.

SAP Transportation Management documents in Sales Order document flow

Objectives

Each release of SAP S/4HANA comes with lots of big and long-awaited features which are heavily advertised. And sometimes there are small things which are useful but tend to be a little less in the spotlight. Today I would like to draw your attention to one such feature, the integration of SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) Freight Units and Freight Orders in the Sales Order document flow.

Federated SAML SSO with Azure AD and SAP HANA [docker image]

Abstract.

Azure AD (Active Directory) has become an increasingly popular choice as a SAML SSO identity provider with SAP applications.

Azure AD makes it a relatively simple task to set up SAML SSO with the likes of [SAP HANA], [SAP Analytics Cloud] etc. by providing easy to follow step by step guides.

SAP HANA DB Migration/Restore from Multi-Node to Single-Node

Introduction:

As HANA DB is growing, there are many DB Migrations/Conversions coming up in the SAP world. I always had a question how to perform DB Refresh/Restore Multi Node(PRD) to single Node(QAS).  This post mainly outlines/answers the below questions

HANA DB with extension node upgrade steps

This Blog covers the steps of upgrading HANA database having extension node.

Here, We have BW/4HANA installed with extension node. In this blog I will be showing DB Rev upgrade from HANA 2.0 SP3 Rev33 to HANA 2.0 SP3 Rev37

Prerequisite: <sid>adm user on both DB nodes should have the same password

Here i will be using below naming convention

Tips: VS Code Extensions

In this blog post, I am sharing the top 10 extensions that I personally use on my Node.js development, as well as when developing in Cloud Application Programming (CAP) Model. I hope you would find it useful too in your backend development work.

COVID-19 Tweets analysis using HANA ML Python APIs.

Since long i am seeing various post on COVID-19 data analysis and forecasting and having the same thought i decided to post my recent work mainly on text mining & text analysis on COVID-19 tweets & data.

IDEA is to connect twitter from python and insert data into SAP HANA and utilize the built-in powerful capabilities in SAP HANA for text mining & text analysis & displaying word cloud and using few text mining functions as well.

Install the Four Pillars of a Quality Organization to Create Better Products

Docker Containers subject has been rolling around for quite some time now. Even it has gained much more interest with SAP R&D team for reducing the hardware cost, resource consumption, easy maintenance, etc…  There has been many blogs and research already rolling out on this subject integrating SAP with Docker containers.

Step-by-step Financial Statement Version Reporting with Currency Type Characteristic on S/4 Hana + Embedded BW

Motivation

During analysis of a business process for reporting, some of the required developments for the need and how to develop them are crystal clear. We tend to think of the required development elements on-the-fly/instinctively while analyzing the process. Almost in a visual way, but sometimes, even after working in BI environment for 10 years, I find myself asking simple how-to-do questions and searching for a relevant blog article to answer the question.

Setting up END2END SAML integration between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP HANA on Premise using ADFS Identity Provider

This blog describes How to implement END2END SAML using same Identity Provider (IdP) for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP HANA

With this approach / configuration, users will have the advantage to use same IdP credentials only once while logging into SAP Analytics Cloud and don’t have to enter the credentials again while creating Live Connection to SAP HANA

Material Master Views in SAP S/4 HANA

In the current SAP blog post, we will cover all the MM views with the implication of vital processes in the standard SAP system. You will see how each of the views is created, its obligatory data, optional fields, and how its creation reflects the system

S/4 HANA Material Master – Views:

As I have shown in below screenshot, we have mainly 7 following views

SAP HANA Views – Back End Tables & Where Used List Details

The purpose of this blog post is to provide back end /physical tables source information  of created SAP HANA Analytic & Calculation views during data modelling. This can be helpful for the developers to get an overall picture of created views with the where used list details and  the back end logic’s behind  at the time of creating views.

There are certain standard system views, which was provided by SAP by using these views we can get this information.

Deploying .NET code on HANA XS Advanced

SAP has implemented Cloud Foundry (CF) on its SAP Cloud Platform, as a next-generation Platform as a Service (PaaS) as a development and runtime environment. CF offers a set of tools and services to run applications developed with different programming models.

SAP HANA® in-memory database also provides an application platform called SAP HANA® extended application services (XS Advanced or XSA). XSA is available on-premise and follows development paradigm compatible with CF.

We will cover specific aspects on how to prepare your XSA execution environment for Go-Live phase and make sure your applications run safely with given constraints on memory resources.

DR Drill for HANA 2.0 multi-tier replication with reverse replication

I have been trying to achieve reverse replication in HANA 3 tier replication environment avoiding full sync. I have referred many HANA replication blogs and thought to write one having clear picture how it works.

Here we have 3 Sites

Site A to Site B (Replication type : SyncMem, operation mode : logreplay)

SiteB to Site C (Replication type : Async, operation mode : logreplay)

HANA Data Strategy: Data Ingestion including Real-Time Change Data Capture

HANA Data Ingestion

Business Value

Simply put HANA data ingestion techniques allow SAP customers to gain immediate access to all of their enterprise and internet data and using HANA real-time virtual modeling techniques easily and quickly get a harmonized well governed enterprise wide view of all of this data to perform advanced analytics and deliver new and advanced insights to the business quicker and more affordably using this single digital business platform.

Execute Stored Procedure from SAP Analytics Cloud with NodeJS App

In this post, we’ll learn how to create a custom widget in SAP Analytics Cloud, Analytic Application to execute stored procedure directly from the UI by clicking a button. After the execution is complete, the message box will pop-up with the status.

Flow Diagram

There are two components that we’ll build: Custom Widget and NodeJS app.

We start by creating the SAC custom widget JavaScript Web Component for main and styling panel and define the widget id, name, web components, properties, methods and event objects in a JSON file.

SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA

Overview

The purpose of this blog is to plan a transition from conventional SAP ERP system to SAP S/4 HANA. SAP Readiness check for SAP S/4HANA assists customers with planning and preparation activities necessary to convert an SAP ECC system to SAP S/4HANA. SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA supports SAP ERP 6.0 (Enhancement Package 0 to 8) and SAP S/4HANA Finance 1504 and 1605.

Installation Of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS03 Single-Host On SUSE LINUX 12 SP3

This article is to explain the steps of the HANA 2.0 installation on SUSE Linux 12 SP3. The configuration and permission setups explained in this article is not for the production environment but to practice the HANA administration tasks.

SAP S4/HANA Extensibilty

In this blog, we are going to explore SAP S4/HANA Extensibility options available for both On-Premise and Cloud Editions. I have read multiple posts and have visited numerous SAP’s official websites in order to completely understand this extensibility framework. I couldn’t find all the required information together. This actually motivated me to write this, my very first one. I would like to thank all the SCN Contributors who have helped me, in writing this post.You can find all the relevant information related to S4/HANA Extensibility here.

Combining Data Intelligence and HANA Predictive Analytics Library for a simple Covid19 risk calculator

In this scenario we are going to work into the creation of a simple (and simplistic) Covid19 risk calculator for Mexico, using Mexico government open data. Using this data, we will train a logistic classification model so we can predict death risk based on Mexican pandemic behavior.

We start going to our Data Intelligence Launchpad so we can create a new connection on Connection Management tile. We put our data in an S3 bucket, so we have to create an S3 connection. In addition, we create a connection to our HANA system.

Comprehensive metadata analysis of SAP S/4HANA

In case you ever wondered what, it takes to power all the business processes in SAP S/4HANA, then this is the blog for you. In this blog, I would present the comprehensive metadata analysis of the SAP S/4HANA system and what is under the hood. In S/4HANA the building blocks to power your intelligent enterprise are the ABAP CDS (Core Data Service) Views. The logic embedded in the views enable the hybrid transactional and analytical processing and is also the reason why you no longer need the aggregates. Here in the figure below is the representation of the SAP S/4HANA metadata in and SAP Analytics Cloud Story.

The Critical Need for SAP ERP High Availability Protection

Meeting Availability SLA’s for SAP Can be Challenging

Meeting high availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is essential to ensure the key components of the IT infrastructure and application are protected and that services to end users, customers, and vendors can be recovered as rapidly as possible in the event of an outage. Many companies set specific recovery time objectives (RTO), and recovery point objectives(RPO) as part of their formal SLA process.

A step by step guide for creating an OData Service on HANA Calculation Views – XSODATA | XSJS

This blog is a short tutorial where you will learn how to publish the HANA Calculation View as an OData service.

What we will be implementing

1. Creating a Simple Calculation View

2. Create an XS Project

Downsizing a HANA Instance on Azure VM

Description about the activity performed:

This document provides detailed information on how to downsize an existing Hana VM built on Azure to a VM which has lower hardware configuration. While reducing VM size in Azure is relatively easy, Hana being an in-memory database, the disks are usually proportional to the VM memory size.This document outlines how to right-size the VM and disks.

Hands-On Tutorial: Becoming the Chief Data Cook with RStudio and SAP HANA

Data science is quite similar to cooking and making your favorite meal. While we can usually simply go to our local supermarket and acquire our raw ingredients, it is often not that easy for a data scientist. Imagen before cooking your favorite meal you didn’t know if the supermarket is open or if the food is even edible. Hence, before the fun part the cooking and eating can start, we need to acquire, organize and structure our data. This is by my experience one of the crucial parts during a Machine Learning use case and usually takes most of the time. Often, the data does not just reside locally in a csv or excel file on our laptop but originally lies in a database like SAP HANA. To work on a database like SAP HANA you usually work with the Structured Query Language (SQL) which is over 40 years old. But as a huge R fan I want to stay in my used environment and not switch back and forth. For example, after the first modeling phase I may have to go back into the data preparation phase to engineer new features. Hence, I want to be more flexible but still use the power of SAP HANA. The R package dbplyr brings both worlds together and is designed to work with database tables as if they were local data frames in R. The goal of the package dbplyr is to automatically generate certain SQL statements for you, focusing on select statements. This means you can continue to use the functions out of the dplyr package with which you are familiar with.

Removing outlier using standard deviation in SAP HANA

In this blog post we will learn how to remove the outlier in the data-set using the standard deviation , We can have one sample data set with product sales for all the years.

Before moving into the topic we should know what is a outlier and why it used. The Outlier is the values that lies above or below form the particular range of values . For example consider the data set (20,10,15,40,200,50) So in this 200 is the outlier value, There are many technique adopted to remove the outlier but we  are going to use standard deviation technique.

We already know that the standard deviation is square root of the variance. In HANA we have aggregation type STDDEV to calculate it.

Iterative Feature of PaPM Allocation function

In this blog, I would like to show how to leverage and implement iterative feature of allocation function in SAP Profitability and Performance Management (PaPM) as highly flexible and easily adaptable solution to fit specific business needs. Using only one PaPM Allocation function through multiple allocation iterations, it is possible to solve common allocation business problems.

How to achieve this high calculation model efficiency and simplicity?

1. Prepare sender and receiver data for allocation calculation
2. Simple set up of PaPM allocation function.

The Micro-Focus Product portfolio – and how it can support the journey to SAP S/4HANA

A long lasting partnership

SAP and Micro Focus have combined their strengths since more than 12 years in a steady and solid partnership, enriching their respective product portfolio with each other.

Whereas SAP is a market leader in Enterprise Application Software (ERP), Micro Focus is leading the market in the field of software quality assurance.

Hands-On Tutorial: Leverage SAP HANA embedded Machine Learning through an R Shiny App

As a student I was focused on the statistics and the modeling of the machine learning algorithms but in practice we are not done with just our R or Python script. In reality, important aspects like the data quality or the deployment of the models must be addressed. Therefore, I started setting up the R Machine Learning client for SAP HANA, which is not only an in-memory database but also comes with various machine learning capabilities. In this blog I will show you how you can stay in your used environment and beloved RStudio and leverage the power of the SAP HANA especially through the combination of the RJDBC, hana.ml.r and shiny packages. In addition, we want to create a dynamic web app directly from R to let users interact with our data and analysis. Clearly, our goal in this Hands-on Tutorial is to give data purpose.

CAP: Consume External Service – Part 2

In my previous blog post Consume External Service – Part 1, I have tested the application using mock and real data. Just by configuring the NorthWind OData service URL in the credentials.url property, I was able to connect to the external service. This approach is only applicable for local development testing. If you try to deploy this into SCP Cloud Foundry, you will encounter an error stating that this approach is not valid for production use.

The reason behind this is that external service consumption in this CDS framework is meant to use the Destination Service in Cloud Foundry. And this is the topic of this blog — deploying the Node.js project into SCP Cloud Foundry using Destination Service.

SAP EWM on HANA Analytics Scenarios – SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and BW/4HANA

This blog post will be focused on the “How” part, showcasing a few technical scenarios, components and integration between them, serving as a landing page to anybody that is looking for preliminary guidance.

Further to say this reading requires understanding of HANA development and modeling, specifically CDS Views and Calculation Views, BW/4HANA (with LSA++) and SAP Analytics Cloud, as we are not going to deep dive into these concepts/ tools.

CAP: Consume External Service – Part 1

Prerequisites

- SAP Business Application Studio / Visual Studio Code
- SAP Cloud Platform Account – Cloud Foundry Environment

Real-time data replication to Data Warehouse Cloud

I will follow the steps below:

1. Create Graphical View
2. Replicate data from SAP HANA to Data Warehouse Cloud in real-time
3. Create a story for checking record count
4. Update the data on source system and confirm the data is replicated in real-time

How to build and deploy a new Hana application in five minutes

Having worked with all the various SAP offerings around Hana development, the speed and ease of development were never satisfying. Therefore I am promoting a slightly different approach here.

Goal

My customers wanted to create a Hana application. So they needed the table definitions, deploy that table, load it with initial data and then wrap an UI5 application around. Finally maintain the user authentication, specify authorizations down to the row level security and move all to production.

Changes in Sales & Distribution (SD) in SAP S/4HANA w.r.t ECC

‘Order to cash’ process is the backbone for most of the industries. Many a time, we face the questions from the existing SAP ECC customers ‘Why to migrate to S/4HANA’ when there is no change in Sales order type or item category or Fiori app for creation of sales order etc in S/4HANA. We, as a consultant should be aware of the changes in Sales & distribution (SD) in S/4HANA w.r.t SAP ECC and the corresponding business benefits to the customers for migration to S/4HANA.

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation & SAP Conversational AI – Part 2

Introduction:

I have used SAP Intelligent Robotic process automation to create a record which automates a SAP UI5 Application. This is same app which was built in the previous step using SAP Cloud Application Programming Model. This app is running on LOCALHOST on my desktop and wanted to see SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation bot in action which will help to automate the tasks.

Index for Development Details:

Introduction, Prototype briefing, Details of Technical Implementation of SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, SAP HANA Graph on ABAP Platform for SAP S/4HANA 1909 and SAP Conversational AI are mentioned in the following Blog Posts.

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation & SAP Conversational AI & SAP Cloud Application Programming Model- Part 1

Introduction:

I had a chance to explore SAP Cloud Application Programming Model, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, SAP Conversational AI, SAP Cloud Platform OData Provisioning, SAP HANA Graph on ABAP Platform for SAP S/4HANA 1909 and Amazon Alexa and to tie all together.

I have attempted to build a prototype with Step Zero learnings of different concepts. An absolute ease of using different languages, programming models, libraries, tools and technologies.

Working with Esri shape files, Python and SAP HANA

Working with SHP files is not always as easy as it seems to be.

For example, we have a lot of interesting geo-spatial capabilities embedded in SAP HANA, but in one way or another we need to ingest this kind of information to the system. Usually, this spatial information is distributed on what is known as Shape files. Taking wikipedia definition, a shape file is:

The shapefile format is a geospatial vector data format for geographic information system (GIS) software. It is developed and regulated by Esri as a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products. The shapefile format can spatially describe vector features: points, lines, and polygons, representing, for example, water wells, rivers, and lakes. Each item usually has attributes that describe it, such as name or temperature.

Transferring large amount of data to SAP HANA Cloud

Overview

In this blog, I will transfer large volume of data from On-Premise SAP HANA to SAP HANA Cloud. I will use Smart Data Integration (SDI), which is ETL function of SAP HANA Cloud, to transfer data.

Environment:

◉ SAP HANA 2.0 Revision 42 : On-Premise、running on AWS us-east
◉ Data Provisioning Agent 2.0 SP04 Patch24 : running on AWS us-east
◉ SAP HANA Cloud on SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry : running on AWS Frankfurt

Testing virtual table replica feature of SAP HANA Cloud

Introduction

SAP HANA Cloud can virtually integrate data to be positioned as a "gateway for enterprise data" within the enterprise. Specifically, it is possible to virtually integrate various data sources via a virtual table created on HANA Cloud (data federation).

However, in actual operation, there may be cases where you want to retain data in SAP HANA Cloud due to network speed and performance / load on the source system side.

Single Sign-On (SSO), personalized user access to SAP APIs and the application you can build with it

Introduction

One of the features of a SAP S/4HANA system is the availability of a wide variety of available SAP standard oData-APIs. Since APIs are mostly understood only by technical oriented people I wanted to show the power of APIs by building a small application iPhone application that combines usability by providing image recognition functionality with business context based on the underlying SAP system.

SAP HANA Daily Operation best practices

I am a former Infrastructure Consultant and I worked in operations, outsourcing and even in support.

I would like to share my best practices on SAP HANA Operation and Maintenance. I will focus on infrastructure setup and high availability topics.

Keep in mind that those ideas are my best practices and may not fit to your landscape.

All comments are for production systems, but  might help with non production systems,too.

SAP HANA Turns 10 Giveaway Contest

We’re inviting YOU to join the SAP HANA Turns 10 Giveaway Contest! Share a video of yourself (and others so long as you’re respecting social distancing!) wishing SAP HANA a happy 10th anniversary on either Twitter or LinkedIn for a chance to win one of the limited editions #SAPHANATurns10 swag items.

Transform into an Insight-Driven Business using SAP Data Warehouse Cloud – Part 2

In the previous blog post, I had covered the concepts around connecting to remote HANA systems and modeling the views so that they are ready to be consumed by analytical tools. In this blog post, I will show how you can use the embedded SAC as well as 3rd party tools to connect to the modeled views.

Business Catalog:

The Data builder, provides the technical layer in DWC where we can create tables and model the views. The Business Catalog gives access to the business layer of DWC. This is where business users will be able to browse through existing business entities, view how they are all connected and also understand the business purpose and metadata which would help them build their reports.

Transform into an Insight-Driven Business using SAP Data Warehouse Cloud – Part 1

In this blog, I wanted to focus on Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC) which is a scalable, persona-driven DWaaS tailored for IT and business users.

Secure connection from Python to SAP HANA

I used the program from that tutorial to connect to the SAP HANA Cloud instance. As discussed before this communication has to be secure. The same requirement applies as well if connecting to an HDI container in SAP Cloud Platform trial, as I showed in our live streaming with Maximilian Streifeneder recently.

So, let’s just slightly modify the program pythonQuery.py and make sure sslValidateCertificate=True is set and try it on Windows 10, Linux (Ubuntu), and MacOS Catalina.

Connecting SAC to HANA Cloud the Easy Way – Using Application Studio to Deploy the HAA (Hana Analytics Adapter)

Finding this information can be hard, it is often good to refer to a text/static version so I have captured the steps in this blogpost.

The are 6 main parts to connect SAC to HANA Cloud

1. Access the Business Application Studio
2. Hana Analytics Adapter Configuration
3. Create Role Collection
4. Assign Role to Cloud Platform Users
5. Verify Access to InA using Application URLs
6. SAP Analytics Cloud Connection

High Availability and DR for SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Central Services

As SAP application touches many critical parts of a company such as its’ ERP, manufacturing, business processes, customer service etc. it has become the lifeline of many enterprises that depends on it for their business to operate properly. As such, high-availability has became one of the top concerns of company managements when it comes to their SAP systems.

In this article, we will discuss at a high-level what is HANA system replication, how it works, what are the limitations when it comes to high-availability, and how we can overcome them. We will also discuss about the options for SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA and SAP Central Services’s high-availability and what are the key differences, so that you can choose the right tool for the right job.

Sendgrid SMTP Replay Configuration Using Postfix in SAP S/4HANA

Overview

In this blog post I have explained about how to use / configure Sendgrid as SMTP relay in SAP S/4HANA using postfix mail package in Redhat linux.

Environment Details :

Linux Version : Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.6

Transpose Row-set into Column Name – Dynamic Table Creation in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS04

Introduction

During BI implementation of a project, there could be a reporting requirement where row data need to be transposed as column name. In various BI landscapes, usually data is ingested from sources on which data cleansing/massaging is performed and then data get loaded into table which feeds to reporting layer.

SAP HANA Cloud Overview Webcast Summary

Overview of latest HANA product released to the market

How can you use it?

What are the use cases?

Features, benefits

Create graphs on SAP HANA Cloud

Start there to learn how to create your own SAP HANA cloud instance and develop with SAP Web IDE Full-Stack.

Our goal is to create a graph workspace that represents routes travelled between airports by different airlines.

Extending the Migration Cockpit “Material” Object with EXTENSIONIN for Subscription Data Fields

Introduction:

The requirement is to mass load new material master records of material type SUBS (Subscription Product) into a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4 BRIM (Billing and Revenue Innovation Management). The SAP S/4 Migration Cockpit is being used; however, the “Material” migration object does not include the Subscription Data fields: Billing Cycle, Billing Cycle Determ, and Assignment Schema.

Code Pushdown

As we know when we move to a HANA database the idea is to go pull on for “code pushdown”.

The bottleneck for performance has traditionally been moving records between the database and the application server.

SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Adaptation Transport Organizer

This blog post is a summary of detail steps for setting up Adaptation Transport Organizer, which is a pre-requisite for using in-app extensibility.

In-app extensibility covers the most common changes most customers need to make to their SAP S/4HANA solution, including:

Transferring data from On-Premise SAP HANA to SAP HANA Cloud using SDI

Overview

In this blog, I will transfer data from On-Premise SAP HANA to SAP HANA Cloud using SDI (Smart Data Integration).

SAP HANA Cloud includes SDI which is an ETL tool, this means that you can easily integrate various kinds of source systems into SAP HANA Cloud without installing ETL application. Moreover, you can develop ETL jobs as same as developing tables and views, this makes it easy and quick to develop ETL jobs.

Part 1: How to Create Dynamic Images in SAP Analytics Cloud Story

Introduction:

In SAP Analytics Cloud, we can add static images or dynamic images (stored in a remote database Ex: SAP HANA) to a Story.

Prerequisites:

To create a dynamic image, you will need a model based on a HANA view with the following attributes:

Connect to SAP HANA from Windows PowerShell using ODBC

There Dan described how to use ODBC Data Source application to configure connections to SAP HANA on Windows and then how to use MS Excel as a client to get data from SAP HANA using configured ODBC connections.

What can I use to try this out programmatically out of the box on Windows 10?

After a bit of research, it looked that scripts using Command Line and PowerShell are the “programming” environments (again, out-of-the-box, meaning no additional installation required).

Getting MAX/MIN Date on BW Query Designer (BEx), Compatible with BusinessObjects

Introduction:

The maximum and minimum with regarding to date subject has been on my mind for quite a while. I searched for it a couple of years back and did not come to a significant answer but to make the date as a Key Figure then use the query conditions to retrieve the TopN based on that date Key Figure, or BottomN in case of minimum, this solution will work only on the Analyzer, or Analysis for office level, however once this query is consumed bw Web Intelligence for example, conditions will not work, consultants mostly preferred doing this on the report level.

SAP BW/4HANA Business Content Webcast Recap

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Creating HANA (Cloud Foundry) connection with SAP Data intelligence and Applying Random Forest

Data being one of the most important assets for any Enterprise , its exploration and analysis becomes very crucial.

SAP Data Intelligence is a very powerful tool , which lets you do those complex processing on the data .

What is SAP Data Intelligence and how does it relate to Data Hub?

In this blog, you will be able connect HANA database as a service with Data Intelligence, explore the data via meta explorer and apply Random Forest Classifier algorithm on it.

Secure connection from HDBSQL to SAP HANA Cloud

First things first

By default an SAP HANA Cloud instance allows access to the instance only from SAP Cloud Platform. All other IP addresses must be explicitly whitelisted by an administrator.

If the IP address of a machine running your HDBSQL is not whitelisted, then you get the error while trying to connect:

Geospatial Data Processing in SAP HANA

Introduction:

To create a location enabled model in SAP Analytics Cloud from a live HANA calculation view, Location Data must be prepared through SAP HANA Studio.

The Latitude and Longitude can be converted in to Location Dimension using Spatial data types like Geometry (ST_Geometry) and POINT (ST_Point).

Migrate Calculation Views from On-Premise SAP HANA to SAP HANA Cloud – Part 3

Overview

The objective of this blog series is to share the experience of migration test from SAP HANA On-Premise to SAP HANA Cloud. In Part 1, I have converted classical Calculation Views to XSA based HDI Container model. In Part 2, l have migrated the model from SAP HANA On-Premise to SAP HANA Cloud. In this blog, I will transfer data from SAP HANA On-Premise to SAP HANA Cloud.

Migrate Calculation Views from On-Premise SAP HANA to SAP HANA Cloud – Part 2

Overview

The objective of this blog series is to share the experience of migration test from SAP HANA On-Premise to SAP HANA Cloud. In Part 1, I have converted classical Calculation Views to XSA based HDI Container model. In this blog i will migrate the model from SAP HANA On-Premise to SAP HANA Cloud.

Migrate Calculation Views from On-Premise SAP HANA to SAP HANA Cloud – Part 1(EN)

Overview:

SAP HANA Cloud was released in March 2020 and many of you, especially SAP HANA On-Premise users, are interested in the next generation “Database as a Service” product. The objective of this blog is to share the experience of testing migration from SAP HANA On-Premise to SAP HANA Cloud.

SDI – DP Agent and Remote Source Configuration in HANA to Read Data from S/4HANA

HANA Smart Data Integration (SDI) Introduction:

SDI is HANA database native technology to support all styles of data integration. It can be used for data federation (Smart Data Access), real-time data replication and to apply complex transformations on the data.

SDI is available on SAP Cloud Platform and every HANA database since HANA SPS09.

SAP HANA Result Cache: Static and Dynamic

Caching is used widely in SAP HANA as a strategy to improve performance by re-using queried data rather than re-reading and processing the data every time it is requested. The static result cache and the dynamic result cache are applications of this.

The static result cache is created for a specific view and remains valid for the duration of a user-defined retention period. The dynamic result cache is similar but does not have a retention period; it guarantees transnational consistency by maintaining delta records of all changes applied to the underlying table.

Small Hands-on SAP HANA Application Lifecycle Management

In this article you will see how to transport native HANA objects between systems.

HANA Application Lifecycle Management (HALM) is easy to use part of XS services (SAP HANA Extended Application Services). It can be configured based on your preferences. The user should have a particular roles assignment.

First of all, we should have objects which we are going to transport from our source HANA system to the target. For this particular reason I will create a sub package Test_HALM in our main Test package.

Periodic accrual process and configuration in accrual engine- S4 HANA 1909

Introduction

With S/4HANA 1909, accrual engine has introduced “Review and Approve accruals” transactions.

There are additional transactions introduced are as follows:

1. ACEPROPOSALRUN – Propose Periodic Amounts
2. FACRATIVL – Edit Time Intervals for Accruals Reviews and Approvals
3. FACRARVWCO – Review Periodic Accruals – Controllers
4. FACRAAPPRVGL – Approve Periodic Accruals – G/L Accountants

The process is driven by Standard accrual periodic flow wherein accrual object is created by preparer, reviewed by reviewer, approved by approver and then it is can be posted manually or by scheduling batch jobs.

Cost Center Budget Availability Control – S/4 HANA 1909

Cost Center Budget & Commitment

This blog post details the configuration steps of Cost Center Budget and Commitment, which is the new functionalities introduced from On Premise solution – S/4 HANA 1909.

Budget availability control allows you to control budget consumption in cost centers, which you’re responsible for. It supports business processes, from budgeting to cost postings, and it offers specific budget reporting for the budget and cost-carrying objects

SAP HANA Upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0, project options.

In the recent few months, there were several questions about HANA 2.0 upgrade in the forums. Some developers thought that, it is a big change and lot of things get changed with that. It is not true though in all cases. In this blog, I am writing about the options generally available while doing the upgrade project to 2.0.

If it is just a database upgrade, then It is fairly a simple process which is taken care by basis/Admin team, leaving modelers/developers with no specific task to be done during this process.